stan wrote at 16:13 -0500 on Feb 25, 2009:
> It appears that the mainstream development of Amanda has taken off in a
> direction that has/will result in making in impossible to compile on many
> existing platforms that have been historically supported by Amanda.
>
> While there are good reasons for this change, it represents a major loss of
> functionality for us, and I suspect many other long term Amanda users who
> depend on being able to use this package to backup their older clients.
>
> I have been discussing this issue at length, off list, with one of the
> developers of the project. His recommendation is that we create a "client
> only" version of Amanda that is a fork off of the 2.5.2.x branch of th
> tree. This version, as I understand it predates the need for glibc, which
> as I have just discovered is unsorted on may many hardware/software
> architectures. I think it also predates the need for pkg-configure, which
> does not seem to have the same portability issues as glib, but is IMHO an
> unnecessary build time dependency, given that configure was designed for,
> what I believe to be, the same need.
>
> I am thinking about volunteering to lead this effort, as we are in the
> middle of upgrading a fairly large Amanda installation at my work, and i
> have, at least, 3 OS/hardware pairs thta are not supported by glib.
>
> I would like to hear from other users of Amanda how they feel about this. i
> hope the collective wisdom of the list may help to provide some direction
> for my thoughts.
I am sympathetic to the needs of running old platforms.
But if you need to do so, at a certain point, it becomes an exercise of
self-maintenance. It's like maintaining a 50 year old car. You can't
just go to Napa and get a part sometimes.
Developing for a project like amanda is, to some extent, a juggling
exercise. They (the developers) have to deal with a variety of OS's
of various ages. I can understand the decision to depend on glib (not
glibc, BTW) from a portability aspect. (I'm less convinced about
perl, but that's another matter).
glib was partly chosen _because_ it's more portable (again not glibc),
but it can sometimes have edge cases when using it on older systems.
This is a much more general question that applies to more than
just amanda.
But, that said, there is some effort expended to ensure that newer
amanda servers can speak to older clients (going the other way, new
client - old server, is another matter, but that works to a certain
extent, too). So for older platforms, you _can_ (as others have
mentioned) just freeze the amanda version on the client. Most, but
not all, of the new features one would be interested in are on the
server.
Answering your particular notion of forking amanda, it's also another
possibility to expend some effort to build the latest amanda on an old
system. If you don't have to build the server code, it's a more
simplified task. And if you have a set of patches to say, build on
old HP-UX, sometimes they can be applied in the current code (submit
to amanda-hackers). At the least, you can put the patches up on the
wiki. Anyway, that's another possibility for you to consider.
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