[rdiff-backup-users] New Release: 1.2.0

[Andrew Ferguson]

Just a quick announcement that the development branch has become the  
new stable branch, 1.2.0

If you upgrade from 1.0.5 and keep the same repository, you will see  
warnings about SHA-1 checksums missing if you restore files backed-up  
with the previous version. This is to be expected since they were  
introduced in 1.1.1. As files are updated and then backed-up by the  
new stable version, the checksums will be written to the  
mirror_metadata file.

If you wish to eliminate those warning messages at once, you can  
compute the SHA-1 digest (`openssl sha1 <file>`) for each of your  
files and add the "SHA1Digest" entry to that file's entry in the  
mirror_metadata.

Those upgrading from 1.0.5 may also want to take a look at Andreas  
Olsson's Rdiff-Rebuilder script on the Wiki:
http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/RdiffRebuilder



In terms of future releases, I don't want to see the stable version  
fall as behind the development version as it did previously. The  
stable version should maintain backwards compatibility (1.2.x-series)  
since quite a few users seem to be in situations which lead to  
different versions on different machines. Or maybe that's just the  
Debian users. :-)

For the development branch, it will drop support for older versions of  
Python and begin down the path to supporting Python 3 and 2.6, which  
will be released later this year. I see this as the primary reason for  
maintaining a development branch. The new Python releases should set  
the stage for better Unicode support.

I also have most of a a patch to support BSD filesystem flags and ext3  
file attributes, and the start of a patch to handle the case where  
rdiff-backup cannot read a file, but can chmod it so that it can read  
it temporarily. When in better shape, they will go into the  
development branch, with the goal of being backported.



Many thanks to everyone involved in this long development cycle.



Andrew



Changes since 1.1.17:


New in v1.2.0 (2008/07/27)
---------------------------

Fall back on the Python make_file_dict function when the filename  
contains
non-ASCII characters. (Andrew Ferguson)

Ignore Extended Attributes which have Unicode characters outside the  
current
system representation. These will be correctly handled when rdiff-backup
switches to Python 3, which will have full Unicode support. (Andrew  
Ferguson)