[rdiff-backup-users] Re: How to manage with old[ish] versions?

[Chris G]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:58:58PM +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Chris G wrote:
>
>> I am using rdiff-backup from xubuntu 8.10, the version available on the 
>> Ubuntu repositories is 1.1.16.  This makes life rather difficult when 
>> trying to backup to and fro from systems where I'm building rdiff-backup 
>> myself.
>>
>> OK, I can do backups between different versions but it gives warning 
>> messages and also different versions are sometimes incompatible.
>>
>> Is there any way to tell a newer version to work compatibly (and silently) 
>> with older versions?
>
> I find the simples way is to ignore the packages and install exactly the 
> version that I want from source. Works on any distro :)
>
Yes, that's what I have ended up doing, it's not *entirely*
straightforward though as one end of the backup is just an ssh access
account on my hosting provider so I don't have root there.  Thus I
need to install things needed for rdiff-backup as well as rdiff-backup
itself.  I have to build/install librsync with "--prefix=$HOME" 
before doing the same with rdiff-backup which needs a few extra
install parameters to tell it where things are.

At 'this' end it's relatively easy because I can just apt-get any
libraries required and then install the latest rdiff-backup with a
prefix setting so it installs in /usr/local/bin and doesn't interfere
with anything else.


> I find the backwards-incompatibility to be one of the biggest bugbears of 
> rdiff-backup and boxbackup (which I maintain). I'm still running 
> rdiff-backup 1.0.x on all my machines for this reason.
>

-- 
Chris Green