>
> Hello,
>
> Recently several email design threads have pointed out an important
> deficiency
> in the Bacula project that I would like to discuss. We (I) I have already
> designed (mostly in my head) a good number of future projects -- including
> how to support portable clients better, deleting volume on purge, clients
> initiating backups, ...  Often these are put down in sketchy notes and
> shared
> with the programmer who wants to do the work (mostly Eric).  Generally the
> solutions designed are far more general and complete and already encompass
> much of what is being discussed via email.  The problem is that this
> process
> is not well defined and is not implemented in a way that a number of users
> can participate or even see what those proposed designs are.
>
> It seems to me that we need a more public way to share Bacula design
> proposal.
> Launchpad has a nice way of doing that (I forgot exactly what they call
> it),
> but I have recently moved off of Launchpad because as a project manager, I
> was unable to properly structure the project (it seems that only the
> Launchpad programmers can do that), in addition, I found launchpad very
> difficult to navigate.
>
> What we need is either a place where I can publish approved designs
> (probably
> the web site) or possibly a special design wiki.  At the moment, it is not
> clear to me that a wiki would work well -- the biggest problem is that
> many
> users don't fully appreciate the Bacula philosophy and how Bacula works,
> which means that it is easy to go off on a tangent.  This is not a
> criticism
> of anyone, but is meant to point out that designing new features for
> Bacula
> is very non-trivial and requires a *lot* of work and thought before any
> implementation begins.
>
> I suppose that the first step is for me to write up (or gather up what is
> already written) a few of the designs for ideas that are being discussed
> on
> the email lists so that you can see the direction I currently favor ...

Speaking as a minor hacker / user of the project, that would help greatly.

Speaking personally as a systems architect / developer, it practically makes me 
twitch trying to make any modifications without any design knowledge as far as 
the current project managers and developers, as it is counterproductive and 
quite often results in effort that will never make it to mainline, and while 
generally the work in question is useful to the original party, the effort of 
trying to maintain a secondary patch set is a project in itself, and rarely 
worth the effort long term except for special cases of either strong philosophy 
differences or considerable differences in target use. Anyone who has ever 
tried to work with/for OSS/semi-OSS projects that they do not control probably 
has experienced this at some point (I'm looking at you asterisk).

Currently without dedicating considerable time to just understanding what is 
trying to take place / extracting the information from other quite busy 
developers who quite rightly feel it is unlikely to have any return on time 
investment, or do not wish to rehash said discussions, it is extremely 
difficult to get a good overall picture for anything not already documented 
(and likely mostly completed for a long time) or be able to give any genuinely 
useful input besides very minor modifications and simple bug tracing / fixes as 
most discussion is not held publicly.

Unless there are specific questions posted, or there are specific feature 
requests to be made, I know I personally try to sideline as much as possible, 
as I do not have the understanding necessary at this point, to do much other 
than for the most part, waste others time.

I think Bacula is a wonderful if not very well known project, and vastly 
superior to any other product I have seen save for high end commercial backup 
offerings. It scales quite well, and is adept at covering the needs of quite 
small setups, to very large ones, with some minor caveats. I know it has saved 
my company and some of our customers (though they don't know it) considerable 
time, money, and headache compared to the previous products we have used (for 
instance I hate Arcserve with a passion still that burns in my veins to this 
day), however there are just the same, a few weak points that we have had to 
work around as well that it would be very nice to see those issues handled 
natively and "just work".

>
> Does anyone have any comments or ideas on this?

You asked =)

>
> Best regards,
>
> Kern
>


Blake Dunlap

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