Obnam → blog → 2021 → 11 → 07 → Iteration planning: November 7—21
  1. Assessment of the iteration that has ended
  2. Discussion
  3. Goals
    1. Goal for 1.0 (not changed this iteration)
    2. Goal for the next few iterations (not changed for this iteration)
    3. Goal for this iteration (new for this iteration)
  4. Commitments for this iteration
  5. Meeting participants

Assessment of the iteration that has ended

The goal of the previous iteration was:

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.

This was completed.

Discussion

There was a gap of almost two months between meetings, because Lars has been busy with work and life. This is not a disaster---Obnam being a hobby project---but it might be better to commit to doing less in an iteration and keep a steady pace. So far, Lars does Obnam development in fits of working hard between long periods of not doing anything. That's not a good way to make progress long-term.

Lars created a milestone on gitlab for this iteration. Such milestones have worked well for the Subplot project, so Lars wants to try them for Obnam as well.

Further, Lars created the someday/maybe label and updated labels for a number of issues during this meeting.

Lars feels the next multi-iteration goal should be to improve convenience. After that, improve encryption and security in general.

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 improve the benchmark and try to make Obnam faster. Also, we need to re-start Obnam development.

Commitments for this iteration

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

  • Re-run the large-single-file benchmark, and see if it's possible to change Obnam to make the benchmark run faster. Make it easier to run the benchmark repeatably. (No issue.)
    • 4h
  • obnam#24 -- Doesn't use PlentyFS for testing backups with a lot of data
    • Try using PlentyFS to benchmark backing up 1 million empty files once, and then an incremental no-op backup. Report any issues doing that to PlentyFS.
    • 4h
  • obnam#149 -- Release process doesn't contain cargo audit or cargo deny
    • 0.25h
  • obnam#150 -- Needs a release after 0.4.0
    • 1h

That's a total of about 9 hours, rough estimate, for Lars.

Meeting participants

  • Lars Wirzenius