[BackupPC-users] BackupPC-XS, zlib and Autotools.

[G.W. H. <ba...@ju...>]

Hi there,

It's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped but I'm now in a position to
publish the first Release Candidate for BackupPC-XS version 0.63.

There are two main reasons for needing to do this now.

(1) Since its creation, BackupPC-XS has bundled a version of the zlib
library.  The bundling was I *think* originally done because of issues
with the upstream zlib which were not being addressed.  Things seem to
be different now.  The bundled version is now terribly out of date and
has known security issues.

(2) The build scripts for BackupPC-XS were originally cobbled together
from the build scripts for rsync.  There was never any source included
with the BackupPC-CS distribution which a user could hand to Autotools
to produce the build scripts.  This violated the GNU terms of use, and
made the package maintainers at Red Hat (and probably others) unhappy.

I'm not altogether happy with continuing work on Autotools builds, I'd
much prefer to move e.g. to CMake but in the short term there's really
no way that's going to happen, I don't have the time.  It could be a
self-contained little project for someone to get their teeth into and
would be a valuable contribution.

If anyone would like to take rc1 for a spin we can proceed in several
different ways:

1. Send a tarball to interested parties by email.
2. Post it here (but it's just under 350kbytes).
3. Create e.g. a 'testing' branch on Github.
4. Something else?

Because of the large number of changes I'd be really pleased to have
as many people as possible test this on different architectures etc..
It can be installed in a home directory, you don't have to install it
for the whole system - that could still provide very useful feedback.

-- 

73,
Ged.