[pkg-bacula-devel] Bug#805306: Bug#805306: Would be nice to have a bacula-fd-legacy...

[Anthony DeRobertis]

On 12/05/2015 11:46 AM, Carsten Leonhardt wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> I confess I don't know how much work it'd be, but it'd be nice to keep
>> around the older version of the file daemon as a separate package.
>
> if I were to prepare such a package, I'd want to base it on 5.2.13. And
> of course I'd want it have all the applicable improvements that the
> current packages with version 7.0.5+dfsg-4 have seen. That would mean
> reevaluating the ~70 changes I commited in the meantime.
>
> Then I'd have to keep supporting it, probably until 2020 (end of
> possible jessie LTS).
>
> I would prefer to prepare packages for 7.x for jessie-backports, which
> would solve the problem from another angle.

(sorry if this reads a little funny, I realized I'd buried the important 
bit and just moved it to the top)

If I can find some time (or get the OK to do it at work) to help by 
going through the changes between Jessie and sid, and prepare a 5.2.13 
file daemon only package, would that help? Also, I'd suggest *not* 
supporting it in Stretch-LTS—it's a transitional package to make 
upgrading Bacula easier. The two years of non-LTS Stretch ought to be 
enough time to transition.

(end moved paragraph)

I'm not sure how weird my deployment is, but right now I have at least 
thirty machines and some VMs being backed up by two Bacula directors in 
a disk-to-disk-to-tape config. That, I imagine, puts me on the smaller 
side of "real" deployments. Thankfully it's an entirely open-source 
stack, no weird proprietary software to run, e.g., tape robots. I have 
two machines that run Stretch—a workstation and a test box—maybe will 
gain another VM soon (one which probably won't even be worth backing up, 
as it'll just be a build host).

Those clients run versions of Debian back to, well, way too old (yeah 
for proprietary stuff). We have a bunch on Squeeze LTS and Wheezy. A few 
on Jessie.

All of this works, and has been tested repeatedly. Upgrading to a major 
new version of Bacula is, well, somewhat scary. Especially since the 
director and storage daemon boxes aren't running Jessie.

For now, I've just the reinstalled 5.x file daemon (from Jessie) on the 
Stretch boxes. At home, I'll certainly use the backport once its 
available, but at work... it's very hard to justify risking a 
fully-working, tested backup setup.