Hi,

Les Mikesell wrote on 2013-03-14 13:18:53 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Per-PC 
pools]:
> I'm still somewhat curious about why you dismissed virtual machines,
> which seem to me like a more obvious way to divvy up some
> partly-shared resources - and would offer a cleaner separation of
> control and better (still not great) methods to migrate to
> new/different hardware later.

and, in particular, would require no code changes at all. Yes, I'm curious,
too.

Concerning the code, I won't do more than have a quick glance at it, because
I'm not convinced it's a good idea. What the quick glance tells me, is that
the patch is next to unreadable, because it's not in unified format (i.e. no
context).
So, you seem to change PoolDir and CPoolDir in the library (though I don't see
where; let's hope your code is always executed before some part of BackupPC
tries to access the pool). That basically avoids touching any code in PoolWrite
and probably BackupPC_link. And by having a string setting for the pool
location, you enable pool sharing in a simple way. But you (i.e. the
administrator of the BackupPC instance) had better get the configuration right
(i.e. have the relevant pc/ and *pool/ directories on a common file system).
You don't seem to have checks for hard-linking capability. There's not much
help from the software in case of configuration errors.

You had better hope that the code consequently uses the PoolDir and CPoolDir
settings and not $TopDir/{c,}pool (easy enough to check). You probably remember
that it was a long standing bug that you couldn't set $Conf{TopDir} with the
desired effect ...

Furthermore, you lose the ability to use one BackupPC::Lib object for more
than one host (presuming you need the pool location). BackupPC probably
doesn't do that (I'm guessing), but I don't think this is a documented or
intended property.

While you might successfully use the code virtually forever, I would strongly
discourage anyone else from using it. There is just too much you need to
understand and have in mind. It's sort of half-automatic, because only half of
the consistency checks are done by the software. And by exposing the *PoolDir
settings to the web gui, you are suggesting that they are (changeable)
configuration options, while in reality they are descriptions of your disk
layout to BackupPC. I'd probably have preferred a fixed setting of
"../{c,}pool" relative to the host pc/ directory - i.e. use the pool on the FS
where the pc/ directory is. That is less flexible, but also less error-prone.

Regards,
Holger

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