[Dump-announce] Dump/restore 0.4b48 release

[Tim W. <sou...@wo...>]

Hi everyone,

The 0.4b48 release of dump/restore has been published today containing
fixes for almost a decade of outstanding bugs, mostly as a result of
incomplete ext4 support but a few were present in ext3 too.

This is likely the last release that nominally supports anything other
than linux systems. If anyone is successfully using dump/restore on a
non-linux system then please let me know and I'll see what can be done
but my belief and understanding from looking at the code is that
dump/restore does not work on non-linux systems. (Please also take note
of the code commented by #if 0 in bsdcompat.h which likely introduces an
incompatibility with older versions of dump/restore on non-linux systems
and possibly needs adding back.)

I have added a fairly extensive regression suite, not in the tarball but
available via git in the testcases/ directory. These require root to run
and reformat block devices, so "handle with care".

Thanks to all bug reporters.

And a special thank you to Stelian and Mike for maintaining dump/restore
over many, many years.

Full changelog below.

Regards,

Tim.


Changes between versions 0.4b47 and 0.4b48 (released Oct 20, 2024)
===================================================================
1.	Handle fs with more than 2^32 blocks (Greg Oster)

2.	Handle EA stored in blocks with address >2^32.

3.	Handle the case were EAs are stored across two blocks. Fixes several
 	reported bugs regarding the restore of directory attributes.
 	Additionally, now restore -C passes too. Originally restore -C was
 	patched for files, but not directories, in debian bug#940473 by
 	Alexander Zangerl.  Substantially redone and extended to directory
 	attributes here.

4.	Do not record garbage data in dump for files with
 	EXT2_EXTENT_FLAGS_UNINIT set indicating that the disk block has not
 	been written to and should be assumed to be all zeros.

5.	Dump small files on ext4 partitions with -O inline-data set.

6.	Major performance enhancements on the restoring and verifying of very
 	sparse files.

7.	Handle dumps that are over 2^32 (tape) blocks long (>4T)

8.	Handle restoring sparse files that start with a hole from dump versions
 	0.4b42/43. Previously they were restored but corrupted as some of the
 	initial hole was moved to the end.

9.	Many cleanups. Move to autoconf v0.71. Remove need to build with
 	-fcommon. Build with -W -Wall and without compiler warnings. Add some
 	compile time checks for structures that are written to tape and must
 	not change.

10.	Extensive regression tests. Every bug fixed by 0.4b48 release is now
 	covered by a regression test along with testing the restore of a historical
 	dump created by the previous versions from 0.4b5 through 0.4b47.