Re: [rdiff-backup-users] rdiffweb

[Josh Nisly]

I'm one of the developers of rdiffWeb.  See my responses below.

Toni Price wrote:

> I tried installing it (both current 0.3 and the code in subversion).
> 1) Unless I've missed it, there doesn't seem to be a way to configure
> the port (I landed up hacking the rdiff-web script to do this
> because I already have something running on 8080 which is the
> default)

Good point.  I've added code in subversion that allows you to use a "ServerPort" setting to change this.

> 2) It installs an init script to /etc/init.d which I needed to remove
> since it is incompatible with my distro (gentoo) - though it's true
> this is something very specific to gentoo

I use gentoo myself, but I wanted an initscript that would be compatible with a majority of distros.  Note that you can still use it to start/stop rdiffweb; you just can't add it to the runlevels.

> 3) At first I couldn't get the web server to start up and had to look
> at the source code to figure out how to stop rdiffWeb from swallowing
> the errors

This could be caused by better documentation and better logging options.  You're welcome to help with either; rdiffweb.org is a wiki, and I'll happily accept patches. :-)

> 4) I wasn't reassured by the fact that it saves your database
> password in plain text in a world-readable file

Ouch!  That's really bad.  Fixed in current subversion code.

> 5) Once the initial configuration was complete, it started up without
> errors but attempting to load the main page caused an exception

I suspect that this was caused by using cherrypy 2.2.  I've tried to support 2.2 in current subversion (it's in the Works For Me stage).

> At that point I gave up ... pity, it looks really promising. Maybe
> will revisit this at some stage.

If you'd be willing to retry rdiffWeb with the current subversion code, I'd be honored.  If it works better for you, I'll probably release it as 0.3.5 sometime soon.

Also, if you join the rdiffWeb mailing list and report problems, I'll do my best to fix them.  But I can't fix problems I don't find out about. :-)

Thanks,
JoshN