Re: [mbackup-devel] state machines.

[James O'K. <jo...@mi...>]

The example that I saw was of an NNTP server. This makes me think it would
be a good thing for the network module. The other use would be to solve my
problem with how to keep mbclient, mbserver, and mbrestore all links to
the same program. It's worked well with mbclient and mbserver because they
do the exact same thing just with different config files. mbrestore is
slightly different in that it does the same thing, but in reverse. I still
haven't decided on how to keep track of the filters that a file passes
through. One way is to generate a file that lists all the filters and add
that as the first file to be backed up. Call it .mbackup.filters. This
still causes problems in how to get that file off of the backup media. I
think the answer might be that we just read the mbclient config and
reverse them. This leads to a problem of how to backup and restore _that_
information. This all just leads to circular dependencies.
But. Back to state machines. In the normal process of backups, a filter
can return a few different values, FILTER_OK, NO_BACKUP, and KEEPING.
FILTER_OK means that everything went well and the file as been filtered,
NO_BACKUP means that the filter decided that this file does not need to be
backed up, usually because there is already a current copy on the server.
KEEPING means that the filter is going to keep this file and merge it with
the next file. If we get FILTER_OK we go on to the next filter, the other
two we start over from the beginning of the filter list. With that
description it seems to me that we have different states.

-james