Assessment of the iteration that has ended

The goal of the previous iteration was:

Finish the work to change the Obnam client to use async Rust for making backups. Once this works and is merged, make a new release.

This was not entirely achieved: a release was not made. The release will be carried over to the new iteration.

Discussion

Development themes

Lars has thinking further on how to structure Obnam development and is now thinking that it needs to rotate between three themes: convenience, performance, and security. Each iteration, or short sequence of iterations, should pick one of the themes, and concentrate on that. All three are important for Obnam, so all three should get attention, but splitting the attention tends to result in a more chaotic development process.

Licensing

In obnam#122, Alexander asks why Obnam is under the GPLv3 license, instead of AGPLv3. Lars is inclined to change the license, but doing so needs a check that no other contributors need to be asked.

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 (not changed 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 (new for this iteration)

The goal of this iteration is to set up a way to check what the performance of Obnam is, by implementing a simple benchmark, running that, and recording the results.

Commitments for this iteration

Lars intends to set up an initial benchmark, and do some chores to tidy up things.

• obnam#56 -- SQLite databases for generations have no metadata about themselves (1h)
  • this is relevant for performance so that we can more safely make changes for performance later
• obnam#96 -- Lacks benchmark of the initial backup a large file (4h)
  • this is the big task for this iteration, the start of doing systematic benchmarks
• obnam#122 -- Why isn't Obnam licensed under AGPL? (0.25h)
  • check who've made significant contributions so that we can change the license later
• obnam#127 -- Merge policies are undocumented (1h)
  • draft an update for DONE.md to add merge policies
  • this will hopefully make it easier to handle future code contributions
• obnam#130 -- Requires moreutils just for chronic (0.25h)
  • this will reduce the build dependencies
• obnam#131 -- Benchmark code is in src/bin and doesn't seem to work (1h)
  • fix the benchmark code so it works
  • move it to a better place or drop it entirely
  • this tidies up the code base
• obnam#136 -- Doesn't have a type for checksums (0.25h)
  • this will make it harder to mix checksum values with other strings
• obnam#138 -- Requirements in obnam.md haven't been reviewed lately (0.25h)
  • we should review requirements from time to time

That's a total of about 8 hours, rough estimate, for Lars. This may be a little optimistic.

Additionally, Alexander commits to working on:

• obnam#142 -- Obnam server has not been tested in Debian 11 (bullseye)

Meeting participants

• Alexander Batischev
• Lars Wirzenius