[rsnapshot-discuss] The 'interval' parameter, oh how confusing it is

[David C. <da...@ca...>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 10:47:39AM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 01:43:00PM -0800, Anthony Ettinger wrote:
> > On 11/15/06, Dave Lerner <0i9...@sn...> wrote:
> > > The numbers in rsnapshot.conf are not intervals, but rather those
> > > are the number of snapshots to retain.
> > > So "interval monthly 3" means that you'll keep three monthly snapshots.
> > Thank you. That part always confuses me.
> Perhaps we should rename that parameter - it confuses me sometimes as
> well - to something like 'retain' or 'keep'.  And, of course, keep
> 'interval' as an alias.

And this has now been done in CVS.  The new name is 'retain'.  I think I
caught everywhere in the docs which mentioned 'interval' as well, and
depending on exactly what that bit of doco is talking about, it now
refers variously to 'backup level' (ie hourly, daily, or grapefruit) or
'retention count'.  I also changed various error messages to suit this
as well.

The vast majority of those error messages are only generated when
parsing the config file, and old config files should still work - so
you'll only ever see the new messages after changing the config, and you
do all test changed config files don't you :-)

However, if - heaven forbid - you think that you might get these changed
error messages being spat into log files which are then being monitored
automagically, please look at the CVS diffs to see what changed.

The diff from the previous version in CVS is here:
  http://shorterlink.org/1628

The only *code* change is around about line 770, where we check ...
  if($var eq 'interval' || $var eq 'retain')
which is pretty obviously correct, but I'd be very grateful if someone
could sanity-check the changes I've made to the docs and messages.
After all, I did do this at midnight without any coffee :-)

-- 
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence