[rdiff-backup-users] Feature Suggestions for Cross-Platform-Compatibility

[Toscano2]

Hi,

'hoping to get some feedback this time ...

I'd like to suggest and discuss some features, mainly easing
doing truly cross-platform backups.

- the appended timestamps (e.g. 
'current_mirror.2008-10-07T16:43:00-07:00.data') are not compatible with
Windows. It's impossible to simply copy over/rsync on an ext3-filesystem 
locally rdiff-backupped data later to a Windows system without breaking the 
backups. (Directly using rdiff-backup between local Windows and remote Linux 
system cannot be used.)

So there should be an alternative commandline option (e.g. 
'--use-windows-compatible-timestamps' or just '--use-compatible-timestamps') 
which generates the timestamp without ':'/colons, e.g.: '2007-07-28T10-51-18', 
since the W3-time/datestamps are not meant for being used in filenames.

- the timezone could be left out, if by convention, rdiff-backup would 
use/convert to UTC before writing timestamps to files, e.g. '--use-utc' to 
maintain backward compatibility).So problems with daylight saving time and 
managing servers across different timezones are resolved.

- an option like '--preserve-case' to explicitely override auto-detected 
settings if any case-insensitive filesystem is used (NOT via 
'--override-chars-to-quote').

The last two ideas would keep filenames smaller, in many cases prevent 
filepaths from violating length-constraints.

- finally, something as '--override-chars-to-quote-from-file' would be useful, 
so any non-printable characters/ranges can be specified here, too.
This would ease creating a single compatibility-file for e.g. easy 
Windows-Linux-Mac migration, similar to the '--include-from-file' options.

What do you think of these suggestions?

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