On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 04:35:48PM -0600, Douglas K. Rand wrote:
> 
> Jon> Perhaps it is an added extra check that that should have been in
> Jon> 2.4.2.  Extra checking is not a bad thing.
> Jon> The file is not necessary.  
> 
> I really liked how it behaved in 2.4.2. You told Amanda to tell
> gnu-tar to use an exclude file. Amanda didn't care if the exclude file
> was there or not, and actually gnu-tar didn't care very much
> either. Gnu-tar emits a warning that the exclude file doesn't exist,
> and so it won't use it.
> 
> This was really nice. If you had file systems that you always wanted
> everything backed up, it just worked. If you had file systems that you
> wanted to exclude some things from, just create the exclude file at
> the root of the file system, and presto, it works.
> 
> Now I have to create those empty exclude files everywhere. I know, I
> could use different dump types for those filesystems I want to have
> excludes on, but it was really nice not having to muck with the Amanda
> configurations to exclude some stuff from a filesystem. All I have to
> do is make a file on the client.

You can use the keyword 'optional' on your exclude specification and
amanda will not complain if the file doesn't exist. You don't have
to create empty files.

I changed the default because the default must be to emit error about
everything, if you want some test to not be preformed, it's up to you to
change your config and tell amanda to not do some test.

Jean-Louis
-- 
Jean-Louis Martineau             email: martineau AT IRO.UMontreal DOT CA 
Departement IRO, Universite de Montreal
C.P. 6128, Succ. CENTRE-VILLE    Tel: (514) 343-6111 ext. 3529
Montreal, Canada, H3C 3J7        Fax: (514) 343-5834