Assessment of the iteration that has ended
There was no goal for the previous iteration, due to Lars being busy with life and looking for work.
However, Alexander Batischev changed Obnam to make use of GitLab CI, which will help catch more problems earlier. Also, the logo by Tigran Zakoyan has been accepted and put onto the front page of the Obnam web site. Lars finished up the first version of encryption support.
Discussion
Feature development work
Lars has been thinking. There are many fundamental, necessary features of Obnam that need to be implemented, and to avoid complicating things, it's probably best to work on one at a time. The order matters: the earlier a feature gets some real use, the earlier it gets feedback about what's good and what needs improvement. That feedback is necessary to guide further development. The approach proposed by Lars is to work on one big feature at a time, for an iteration or a few, then switch to another. This will get features into the hands of users earlier, without complicating implementation, when features inevitably conflict.
At the same time, any bugs that are found should be fixed, and the backlog of bugs should also be worked on. It doesn't do to have a list of know bugs in the long run.
The headline features include:
- encryption (first version is there now)
- performance
- fine-grained de-duplication
- securely sharing the server between clients
Of these, performance is the currently most urgent, as it's making it inconvenient for Lars to use Obnam for his own backups.
GitLab.com organisation
The two Obnam git repositories, for code and website, are currently mixed among all of Lars's personal repositories. This is a little confusing to others. It would be nice to create an "organisation" on gitlab.com for Obnam. That will mean some fixing in CI and web pages that link to the current location, but it's better done earlier rather than later.
Goals
Goal for 1.0 (not changed this iteration)
The goal for version 1.0 is for Obnam to be an utterly boring backup solution for Linux command line users. It should just work, be performant, secure, and well-documented.
It is not a goal for version 1.0 to have been ported to other operating systems, but if there are volunteers to do that, and to commit to supporting their port, ports will be welcome.
Other user interfaces is likely to happen only after 1.0.
The server component will support multiple clients in a way that doesn’t let them see each other’s data. It is not a goal for clients to be able to share data, even if the clients trust each other.
Goal for the next few iterations (new for this iteration)
The goal for next few iterations is to have Obnam be performant. This will include, at least, making the client use more concurrency so that it can use more CPU cores to compute checksums for de-duplication.
Goal for this iteration
Change the Obnam client to use async Rust to be more concurrent. The result doesn't need to make optimal use of all cores, but it needs to pass the test suite and needs to work.
Commitments for this iteration
Lars intends to work on the following issues (rough estimates given):
- obnam#96 (email backup benchmark) – 1h
- obnam#109 (make a release) – 1h
- obnam#113 (client is not async) – 4h
The async change is fundamental for the goal of the next few iterations. The benchmark is needed to see if the async change has any effect. The release is needed to get code into the hands of others.
If there's time, Lars will also work on the following:
That's a total of 6h + 1.25h of estimated effort.
Alexander Batischev intends to make any necessary changes to the GitLab CI setup, such as a Docker proxy, if Obnam gets its own organisation on gitlab.com (obnam#116)
Meeting participants
- Alexander Batischev
- Lars Wirzenius