[Bacula-devel] Bacula Status

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

Bad version 5.2.11 release:
Yesterday, we released Bacula version 5.2.12, which fixes a serious segment
fault in Bacula version 5.2.11.  Thanks to Marco, who quickly found the 
problem
and fixed it.  Prior to releasing 5.2.11, it was carefully tested, so it 
points out
a flaw in our regression tests, which I will fix before the next 
release.  I am sorry
for the inconvenience this caused a good number of you.

If you have downloaded version 5.2.11, please replace it with version 5.2.12

Status:
One user wrote sometime ago that he was upset that the Bacula project was
stalled.  I am not sure where he got that idea, perhaps the time between two
releases was a bit long because we were doing more development than 
normally,
but I can assure you that the project is not at all stalled.  Some examples:

 From version       To version       Number of lines of "git diff"
5.2.10                  5.2.12             41,265   latest "minor" release
5.2.0                    5.2.12            154,400  from beginning of 
5.2 releases
5.0.3                    5.2.12            464,364  from last of 
previous major version

So even though the count of lines of diff is not a scientific measure of the
amount of work done or the number of new features, you can see that the
figures above represent a significant development effort.

This development effort comes from three groups:

1. Bacula Systems
2. On going Bacula project developers
3. Community contributions

In one sense people in #2 are also community contributions, but my point
is that they are people such as Marco, and others who have worked for the
project and regularly provide help.  I much appreciate these contributions.
Overall, Bacula Systems, is probably the #1 contributor since about 3 years.

My time:
Due to my heavy workload in ensuring certain administrative aspects of 
Bacula
Systems as well as working on major Bacula Systems programming projects,
I am attempting to optimize my use of time.  One way I plan to reduce my 
workload
is to stop doing the updates necessary to maintain the Windows platform as
well as the Windows builds.  As a result, there are no Windows binaries 
for Bacula
version 5.2.12 -- this isn't a very big problem since there were very 
few changes
to the FD, if any, so everyone can continue using the 5.2.10 Windows 
binaries.
However in the long run (9 months to a year) when significant changes 
are made
to the Windows code or the libraries that they use, this will become a 
problem, so
it would be nice to find an alternative.  There are three alternatives 
that I can see:

1. You build them yourself, as you do with the Linux binaries (unless 
you use distro
binaries, which can be quite old and out of date).

2. Some community user learns how to build them and makes them available.

3. Bacula Systems supplies them.

Comments about the above:
1.  Build your own is not too practical, because you need to be a C++ 
programmer
and have a number of mingw tools built and loaded.  The process is well 
documented,
but not very easy to setup.

2. Having a C++ knowledgeable community member build them is a bit more
practical, but it is often hard to find volunteers and as is just a fact 
of open
source life, the volunteer's life, time, or priority changes and they 
don't often
continue long term.

3. Having Bacula Systems build them would work nicely since it is a long 
term
solution.  The only consideration is that Bacula Systems will want some
very nominal financial compensation for doing so.

You might also want to think about another idea, which is: perhaps Bacula
Systems would be willing to provide binaries for a number of different 
platforms
such as RedHat/CentOS where Bacula versions tend to lag seriously behind the
development code.

I would appreciate your opinions on these, and if you wish to express 
them "publicly" please
send them to the bacula-devel list (and bacula-users list).  If you wish 
to express
them privately, simply address an email just to me.  Please don't 
hesitate to indicate
what sort of price you might be willing to pay for one or both of these 
services.

Best regards,
Kern