path: root/rdiff-backup/CHANGELOG

New in v0.13.4 (??????????)
---------------------------

Checked in patch by John Goerzen to support Mac OS X Finder
information.  As John says:
> Specifically, it adds storage of:
> 
>  * 4-byte creator
>  * 4-byte type
>  * integer flags
>  * dual integer location
Much thanks to John for adding this useful feature all by himself!

Added --compare and --compare-at-time switches for comparing a
directory with the backup information saved about it.  Thanks to Erik
Forsberg, who noticed that this feature was missing.

Regressing and restoring should now take less memory when processing
large directories (noticed by Luke Mewburn and others).

When regressing, remove mirror_metadata and similar increments first.
This will hopefully help regressing a backup that failed because disk
was full (reported by Erik Forsberg).

Fixed remote quoting errors found by Daniel Drucker.

Fixed handling of (lack of) daylight savings time.  Earlier bug would
cause some files to be marked an hour later.  Thanks to Troels Arvin
and Farkas Levente for bug report.

Altered file selection when restoring so excluded files will not be
deleted from the target dir.  The old behavior was technically
intended and documented but not very convenient.  Thanks to Oliver
Kaltenecker for bug report.

Fixed error when --restrict path given with trailing backslash.  Bug
report by Åke Brännström.


New in v0.13.3 (2003/10/14)
---------------------------

Fixed some of the --restrict options which would cause spurious
violation errors.

--list-changed-since and --list-at-time now work remotely.
Thanks to Morten Werner Olsen for bug report.

Fixed logic bug that could make restoring extremely slow and waste
memory.  Thanks for Jacques Botha for report.

Fixed bug restoring some directories when mirror_metadata file was
missing (as when made by 0.10.x version).

Regressing and restoring as non-root user now works on directories
that contain unreadable files and directories as long as they are
owned by that user.  Bug report by Arkadiusz Miskiewicz.  Hopefully
this is the last of the unreadable file bugs...

Rewrote hard link tracking system.  New way should use less memory.

Fixed bug causing rdiff-backup to crash when backing up from system
supporting EAs/ACLs to one that didn't.


New in v0.13.2 (2003/09/16)
---------------------------

Change ownership policy and added --user-mapping-file and
--group-mapping-file switches.  See man page for more information.

Added option --never-drop-acls to cause fatal error instead of
dropping any acls or acl entries.  Thanks to Greg Freemyer for
suggestion.

Specified socket type as SOCK_STREAM.  (Error reported by Erik
Forsberg.)

Fixed bug backing up unreadable regular files and directories when
rdiff-backup is run by root on the source site and non-root on the
destination side.  (Reported by Troels Arvin and Arkadiusz
Miskiewicz.)

If there is data missing from the destination dir (for instance if a
user mistakenly deletes it), only warn when restoring, instead of
exiting with error.

Fixed bug in EA/ACL restoring, noticed by Greg Freemyer.

Updated quoting of filenames and extended attributes names to match
forthcoming attr/facl utilities.  Strange characters should now be
properly escaped.

Fixed problems with --restrict options that would cause proper
sessions to fail.  Thanks to Randall Nortman for error report.

Added new time specification by backup number.  So now you can
'--remove-older-than 2B' or '--list-at-time 0B'.  Original suggestion
by Alan Bailward.

File examples.html added to distribution; examples section removed
from man page.

Removed option --no-change-dir-inc-perms.  Instead when copying
permissions to directory increments, mask with 0777.


New in v0.13.1 (2003/08/08)
---------------------------

Restore of archives made by 0.10.x and earlier fixed, although hard
link information is not restored unless it is current in the mirror.
(Bug reported by Jeff Lessem.)

Fixed problem with door files locally when repository is remote.
(Reported by Robert Weber.)

Patch by Jeffrey Marshall fixes socket/fifo recognition on Mac OS X
(which apparently has buggy macros).

Patch by Jeffrey Marshall fixes --calculate-average mode, which seems
to have broken recently.

rdiff-backup should now work and build with python 2.3.  Thanks to
Arkadiusz Miskiewicz and Arkadiusz Patyk for bug reports and a patch.

rdiff-backup now builds and requires librsync 0.9.6.  This version
should be much better than the old one and everyone should probably
upgrade.  Much thanks to Donovan Baarda for all the work that went
into this release.


New in v0.13.0 (2003/07/22)
---------------------------

To prevent the buildup of confusing and error-prone options, the
capabilities of the source and destination file systems are now
autodetected.  Detected features include allowed characters, extended
attributes, access control lists, hard links, ownership, and directory
fsyncing.  Options such as --windows-mode, --chars-to-quote,
--quoting-char, and --windows-restore-mode have been removed.

Now rdiff-backup supports user extended attributes (EAs).  To take
advantage of this you will need the python module pyxattr and a file
system that supports EAs.  Thanks to Greg Freemyer for valuable
discussion.

Support for access control lists (ACLs) was also added.  An ACL
capable file system and the python package pylibacl (which exports the
posix1e module) are required.  Thanks to Greg Freemyer for valuable
discussion.

Thanks to patches by Daniel Hazelbaker, rdiff-backup now reads and
writes Mac OS X style resource forks!

****** Warning ****** The above features are new to this development
release, and it is difficult to test all the possibly combinations of
source and destination file systems.  They should not be considered
stable.  However, help would be appreciated testing these new
features.

****** Warning #2 ****** rdiff-backup records ACL and EA information
in files designed to be compatible with the utilities "getfacl" and
"getfattr".  However, there is a possible security hole in both these
formats (see
http://acl.bestbits.at/pipermail/acl-devel/2003-June/001498.html).
rdiff-backup's format will be fixed when getf{attr|acl}'s is.

Added --list-increment-sizes switch, which tells you how much space
the various backup files take up.  (Suggested by Andrew Bressen)

Although it should be detected automatically, can avoid copying
permissions to directory increments with --no-change-dir-inc-perms.
(Problem on FreeBSD when backing up sticky directories reported by
Troels Arvin.)

Fixed bug with --check-destination and --windows-mode reported by
Tucker Sylvestro.

The librsync blocksize is now chosen based on filesize.  This should
make operations on large files faster (in some cases, orders of
magnitude faster).  Thanks to Ty! Boyack for bringing this issue to my
attention.


New in v0.12.0 (2003/06/26)
---------------------------

Fixed (?) bug that caused crash when file changes type from regular
file in middle of download (reported by Ty! Boyack).

Failure to construct regular file in regression/restoration only
causes warning, not fatal error.

Removed --exclude-mirror option.  (Probably no one uses this, and it
adds clutter.)

--include and --exclude options should work now with restores, with
some speed penalty.


New in v0.11.5 (2003/06/20)
---------------------------

Added EDEADLOCK to the list of skippable errors.  (Thanks to Dave
Kempe for report.)

Added --list-at-time option at request of Farkas Levente.

Various fixes for backing up onto windows directories.  Thanks to
Keith Edmunds for bug reports and testing.

Fixed possible crash when a file would be deleted while being
processed (reported by Robert Weber).

Handle better cases when there are two files with the same name in the
same directory.

Added --windows-restore switch, for use when when restoring from a
windows-style file system to a normal one.  Use --windows-mode when
backing up.

Scott Bender's patch fixes backing up hard links when first linked
file is quoted.


New in v0.11.4 (2003/03/15)
---------------------------

Fixed bug incrementing sockets whose filenames were pretty long, but
not super long.  Reported by Olivier Mueller.

Added Albert Chin-A-Young's patch to add a few options to the setup.py
install script.

Apparently fixed rare utime type bug.  Thanks to Christian Skarby for
report and testing.

Added detailed file_statistics (in addition to session_statistics) as
requested by Dean Gaudet.  Disable with --no-file-statistics option.

Minor speed enhancements.


New in v0.11.3 (2003/03/04)
---------------------------

Fixed a number of bugs reported by Olivier Mueller:

	Brought some old parts of the man page up-to-date.

	Fixed bug if unrecoverable error on second backup to a directory.

	Fixed spurious error message that could appear after a successful
	backup.

	--print-statistics option works again (before it would silently
	ignored).

	Fixed cache pipeline overflow bug.  This error could appear on
	large remote backups when many files have not changed.


New in v0.11.2 (2003/03/01)
---------------------------

Fixed seg fault bug reported by a couple sparc/openbsd users.  Thanks
to Dave Steinberg for giving me an account on his system for testing.

Re-enabled --windows-mode and filename quoting.

Fixed selection bug:  In 0.11.1, files which were included in one
backup would be automatically included in the next.  Now you can
include/exclude files session-by-session.

Fixed ownership compare bug:  In 0.11.1, backups where the destination
side was not root would preserve ownership information by recording it
in the metadata file.  However, mere ownership changes would not
trigger creation of new increments.  This has been fixed.

Added the --no-inode-compare switch.  You probably don't need to use
it though.

If a special file cannot be created on the destination side, a 0
length regular file will be written instead as a placeholder.
(Restores should work fine because of the metadata file.)

Yet another error handling strategy (hopefully this is the last one
for a while, because this stuff isn't very exciting, and takes a long
time to write):

	All recoverable errors are classified into one of three groups:
	ListErrors, UpdateErrors, and SpecialFileErrors.  rdiff-backup's
	reaction to each error is more formally defined (see the error
	policy page, currently at
	http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/error_policy.html).

	rdiff-backup makes no attempt to recover or clean up after
	unrecoverable errors.

	However, it now uses fsync() to increment the destination
	directory in a reversable way.  If there is an error, the next
	backup will regress the destination directory into its state
	before the aborted backup.

	The above process can be done without a backup with the
	--check-destination-dir option.

Improved error logging.  Instead of the old haphazard reporting
method, which sometimes didn't indicate the file an error occurred on,
now all recoverable errors are reported in a standard format and also
written to the error_log.<time>.data file in the rdiff-backup-data
directory.  Thanks to Dean Gaudet and others for repeatedly bugging me
about this.


New in v0.11.1 (2002/12/31)
---------------------------

**Warning** Various features have been removed from this version, so
this is not a safe upgrade.  Also this version has less error
checking, and, if it crashes, this version may be more prone to leave
the destination directory in an inconsistent state.  I plan to look at
these issues in the next version.  Also, this version is quite
different from previous ones, so you cannot run version 0.11.1 on one
end of a connection and any previous version on the other side.

The following features have been removed:

	--mirror-only option:  If you just want to mirror something, use
	rsync.  (Or you could use rdiff-backup and then just delete the
	rdiff-backup-data directory, and then update the root mtime.)

	--change-source-perms option:  This feature was pretty complicated
	to implement, and if something happened to rdiff-backup during a
	transfer, the old permissions could not be restored.

	All "resume" related functionality, like --checkpoint-interval:
	This was complicated to implement, and didn't seem to work all
	that well.

	Directory statistics file:  Although the session statistics file is
	still generated, the directory statistics file no longer is,
	because the new code structure makes it less inconvenient.

	The various --exclude and --include options no longer work when
	restoring.  This may be added later if there is demand.

	--windows-mode and filename quoting doesn't work.  There have been
	several requests for this in the past, so it will probably be
	re-added in the next version.

Extensive refactoring.  A lot of rdiff-backup's code was structured as
if it were still in one file, so it didn't make enough use of Python's
module system.

Now rdiff-backup writes metadata (uid, gid, mtime, etc.) to a
compressed text file in the rdiff-backup-data directory.  Here are
some ramifications:

	A user does not need root access on the destination side to record
	file ownership information.

	Some files may be recognized as not having changed based on this
	metadata, so it may not be necessary to traverse the whole mirror
	directory.  This can reduce file access on the destination side.

	Even when the --no-hard-links option is given when backing up,
	link relationships can be restored properly.  However, if this
	option is given, mirror files will not be linked together.

	Special file types like device and sockets which cannot be created
	on the remote side for some reason can still be backed up and
	restored properly.

Fixed bug with the --{include|exclude}-globbing-filelist options
(reported by Claus Herwig).

Added --list-changed-since option to list the files changed since the
given date, and added Bud Bruegger's patch to that.  The format and
information this option provides will probably change in the near
future.

Restoring is now pipelined for better high latency performance, and
unchanged files in the target directory will not be recopied.


New in v0.11.0 (2002/10/05)
---------------------------

If get a socket error from trying to create a socket whose name is too
long, just skip file instead of exiting with error (bug report by Ivo
De Decker).

Added --exclude-special-files switch, which excludes fifos, symlinks,
sockets, and device files.

--windows-mode is now short for --windows-time-format --chars-to-quote
A-Z: --no-hard-links --exclude-special-files.  Thanks to Paul-Erik
Törrönen for some helpful windows info.

Multiple --include and --exclude statements can now be given in a
single file.  See the documentation on
--{include|exclude}-globbing-filelist.  Thanks to Henrik Lewander for
pointing out that command line length could otherwise be a problem.

Fixed bug in filelist processing that ignored leading or trailing
whitespace in filelists.  Now filenames with, for instance, trailing
spaces can be used in filelists.  Filelists which took advantage of
this bug for formatting may have to be editted.

Applied major/minor patch contributed by David S.  rdiff-backup should
now correctly copy device files on platforms such as NetBSD.

It is now possible to restore from a read-only filesystem (before
rdiff-backup would fail when trying to open log file).  Thanks to
Gregor Zattler for bug report.

Fixed bug that prevented certain restores when the source directory
was specified with a trailing backslash.

Added a bit more logging so it should be apparent which file was being
processed when an error occurs (thanks to Gerd Knops for suggestion).

Fixed bug when using --chars-to-quote and directory deleted that has
quoted characters in it.


New in v0.10.1 (2002/09/16)
---------------------------

rdiff-backup should now correctly handle files larger than 2GB.
Thanks to Russ Allbery for telling me how to do this.


New in v0.10.0 (2002/09/10)
---------------------------

Fixed bug, probably introduced in 0.9.3, which prevented restores from
a local source to a remote destination.  Reported by Phillip Eby.

Fixed another bug reported by Phillip Eby, where restores would fail
if rdiff-backup had only been run once and no increments were
available.

A few man page additions regarding restoring, statistics, and
--test-server (thanks to Gregor Zattler, Christopher Schanzle, and
Tobias Polzin for suggestions).

Fixed comparison bug where rdiff-backup would unnecessarily report a
directory as changed when its source size differed from its mirror
size.  Thanks to Tim Allen for report.


New in v0.9.5 (2002/08/09)
--------------------------

Fixed --verbosity option (now both -v and --verbosity work).  Thanks
to Chris Dumont for report.

****** IMPORTANT ****** Fixed serious permissions bug found by Robert
Weber.  Previous versions in the 0.9.x branch would throw away high
bit permissions (like the setuid and setuid bits).  This would be
especially bad when running with the --change-source-perms operation.
Anyone running 0.9.0 - 0.9.4 should upgrade immediately.

Complain about --change-source-perms when running as root, as this
option should not be necessary then.

Fixed bug with --windows-mode.  Thanks to Chris Grindstaff for report.


New in v0.9.4 (2002/07/24)
--------------------------

Man page now correctly included in rpm.

To prevent confusion, rdiff-backup script does not have exec
permissions until it is installed (thanks Jason Piterak).

Sockets are now replicated.  Why not?  (Suggestion by Mickey Everts)

Bad resuming information (because, say, it is left over from a
previous version) should no longer cause exit, except when --resume is
specified.

Better error handling in certain cases when errors occur in file reads
(thanks to John Goerzen for report).


New in v0.9.3 (2002/07/15)
--------------------------

Added --sleep-ratio option after hearing that rdiff-backup was too
hard on hard disks (thanks to Steve Alexander for the suggestion).
Quick example:  --sleep-ratio 0.25 makes rdiff-backup sleep about 25%
of the time.  Maybe this will help on bandwidth usage also.

Fixed -m/--mirror-only option.

Added --exclude-other-filesystems option.  Thanks to Paul Wouters for
the suggestion.

Added convenience field TotalDestinationSizeChange (total change in
destination directory - mirror change + increments change) to
session_statistics file.

Handle a particular situation better where a file changes in a certain
way while rdiff-backup is processing it.  Before rdiff-backup would
just crash; now it skips the file.  Thanks to Scott Bender for the bug
report.

A couple interface fixes to --remove-older-than.

Added some security features to the protocol, so rdiff-backup will now
only allow commands from remote connections.  The extra security will
be enabled automatically on the client (it knows what to expect), but
the extra switches --restrict, --restrict-update-only, and
--restrict-read-only have been added for use with --server.


New in v0.9.2 (2002/06/27)
--------------------------

Interface directly with librsync(.a|.so) instead of running "rdiff"
command line utility.  This can significant save fork()ing time when
processing lots of smallish files that have changed.  Also, rdiff is
no longer required to be in the PATH.

Further speed optimizations, mostly reducing CPU consumption when
scanning through unchanged files.

Fixed Path bug which could caused globbing and regexp include/exclude
statements to malfunction when the base of the source directory was
"/" (root of filesystem).  Thanks to Vlastimil Adamovsky for noting
this bug.

Added quoting for spaces in directory_statistics file, hopefully
making it easier to parse.


New in v0.9.1 (2002/06/19)
--------------------------

Fixed some bad C.  Besides being unportable and leaking memory, it may
have lead to someone's backup directory getting deleted (?).

Tweaked some error recovery code to make it more like 0.8.0.

Improved the installation a bit.


New in v0.9.0 (2002/06/17)
--------------------------

Changed lots of the code to distribute as standard python package
instead of single script.  Installation procedure is also different.

Speed optimizations - average user might see speed increase of 2 or
more.


New in v0.8.0 (2002/06/14)
--------------------------

Added --null-separator argument so filenames can safely include
newlines in an include/exclude filelist.

Fixed bug that affected restoring from current mirror with the '-r
now' option.


New in v0.7.6 (2002/05/31)
--------------------------

Improved statistics support, and added --print-statistics and
--calculate-average switches.  See the directory_statistics and
session_statistics files in the rdiff-backup-data directory.

Major improvements to error correction and resuming.

Now signals SIGQUIT, SIGHUP, and SIGTERM are caught to exit more
gracefully.

Fixed crankyness when --exclude-filelist is the last exclude option
and it is given an empty file (thanks to Bryce C for report).


New in v0.7.5 (2002/05/21)
--------------------------

Fixed resuming bug.

After a bit of empirical testing, increased Globals.conn_bufsize and
enabled ssh compression by default (and also added
--ssh-no-compression option).  This should speed up the "typical"
remote session.

Fixed bug noticed by Dean Gaudet in processing of
--(include|exclude)-filelist[-stdin] options when source directory was
remote.

Fixed --include error reporting bug reported by Ben Edwards.

Small change so 'door' files and other unknown file types will be
ignored.  (Thanks for Steve Simitzis for sending in a patch for this.)

Fixed bug noticed by Dean Gaudet where, unless the
--change-source-perms option is specified, rdiff-backup wouldn't even
attempt to open files lacking ownership permissions.


New in v0.7.4 (2002/05/11)
--------------------------

Added new restore syntax and corresponding -r and --restore-as-of
options.  For instance, "rdiff-backup -r 1/3/2002 /backup/foo out"
will try to restore /backup/foo (a file on the mirror directory) to
out, as it was January 3rd, 2002.  See man page for more information.

directory_statistics.<time>.data files will now be created in the
directories underneath rdiff-backup-data/increments.  Just look at one
to see what's inside.

Added extra options --chars-to-quote, --quoting-char, and
--windows-mode, mostly to allow files whose names have colons (:) in
them to be backed up to windows machines.

Now the -l and --list-increments switches can list the increments
corresponding to any mirror file, not just the root directory.  Also
the option --parsable-output was added to control whether the
--list-increments output looks better for a human, or computer.

Improved remove-earlier-than handling so it should run approximately
as fast locally and remotely.

Probably fixed bug noticed by Erminio Baranzini which caused
rdiff-backup to try to preserve access times unnecessarily (the
default is not preserve access times).

Rewrote a few large chunks of code for clarity and simplicity.

Allow extended time strings for the --remove-older-than option.

Added RESTORING section to the manual page because there seemed to be
some general confusion about this.

hardlink_data, current_mirror, and a few other files now carry the
.data extension (instead of .snapshot), to make it clearer they are
not copies of source files.


New in v0.7.3 (2002/04/29)
--------------------------

Fixed broken remote operation in v0.7.2 by applying (a variant of)
Daniel Robbins' patch.  Also fixed associated bug in test set.

Fixed bug recognizing --[include|exclude]-filelist-stdin options, and
IndexError bug reading some filelists.

--force is no longer necessary if the target directory is empty.

--include/--exclude/etc now work for restoring as they do for backing up.

Raised verbosity level for traceback output - if long log error
messages are annoying you, set verbosity to 2.  Will come up with a
better logging system later.

May have fixed a problem encountered by Matthew Farrellee and Kevin
Spicer wherein the _session_info_list information was stored on the
wrong computer.  This could cause rdiff-backup to fail when running
after another backup that failed for a different reason.  May backport
this fix to 0.6.0 later.

May have fixed a problem also noticed by Matthew Farrellee which can
cause rdiff-backup to exit when a directory changes into a
non-directory file while rdiff-backup is processing the directory.
(May also apply to 0.6.0).

Fixed a bug noticed by Jamie Heilman where restoring could fail if a
recent rdiff-backup process which produced the backup set was aborted
while processing a new directory.  (May also apply to 0.6.0)


New in v0.7.2 (2002/04/11)
--------------------------

Added new selection options --exclude-filelist,
--exclude-filelist-stdin, --exclude-regexp, --include-filelist,
--include-filelist-stdin, --include-regexp.

*** WARNING *** the --include and --exclude options have changed.  The
new --include-regexp and --exclude-regexp are close to, but still
different from the old --include and --exclude options.  See the man
page for details.

Friendlier error reporting when remote connection doesn't start.


New in v0.7.1 (2002/03/25)
--------------------------

Now by default .snapshot and .diff increments are compressed with
python's internal gzip.  The new increments format is backwards
compatible, but only rdiff-backup >0.7.1 will be able to restore if
any gzipped increments are present.

Added --no-compression and --no-compression-regexp to control which
files are compressed.


New in v0.7.0 (2002/03/21)
--------------------------

Added hardlink support.  This is now the default, but can be turned
off with --no-hardlinks.

Clarified a bit of the manual.

May have fixed a bug with remote handling of device files.


New in v0.6.0 (2002/03/14)
--------------------------

Fixed some assorted manual "bugs".

Fixed endless loop bug in certain error recovery situation reported by
Nick Duffek, and slightly changed around some other error correction
code.

Switching to new version numbering system:  versions x.2n+1.x are
unstable, versions x.2n.x are supposed to be more stable.


New in v0.5.4 (2002/03/06)
--------------------------

Fixed bug present since 0.5.0 wherein rdiff-backup would make
snapshots instead of diffs when regular files change.

May have fixed race condition involving rdiff execution.


New in v0.5.3 (2002/03/03)
--------------------------

It turns out the previous version broke device handling.  Sorry about
that..


New in v0.5.2 (2002/03/02)
--------------------------

Fixed bugs which made rdiff-backup try to preserve mod times when it
wasn't necessary, and exit instead of warning when it wasn't being run
as root and found a file it didn't own.  (Reported by Alberto
Accomazi.)

Added some more error checking; maybe this will fix a bug reported by
John Goerzen wherein rdiff-backup can crash if file is deleted while
rdiff-backup is processing it.

Changed locations of some of the temp files; filenames will be
determined by the tempfile module.


New in v0.5.1 (2002/02/22)
--------------------------

When establishing a connection, print a warning if the server version
is different from the client version.

When find rdiff error value 256, tell user that it is probably because
rdiff couldn't be found in the path.

Fixed a serious bug that can apparently cause a remote backups to fail
(reported by John Goerzen).

May have fixed a bug that causes recovery from certain errors to fail.


New in v0.5.0 (2002/02/17)
--------------------------

Now every so often (default is 20 seconds, the --checkpoint-interval
option controls it) rdiff-backup checkpoints by dumping its state to
temporary files in the rdiff-backup-data directory.  If rdiff-backup
is rerun with the same destination directory, it can either try to
resume the previous backup or at least clean things up so the archive
is consistent and accurate.

Added new options --resume, --no-resume, and --resume-interval, which
control when rdiff-backup tries to resume a previous failed backup.

Fixed a bug with the --exclude-device-files option which caused the
option to be ignored when the source directory was remote.

By default, if rdiff-backup encounters a certain kind of IOError
(currently types 26 and 5) while trying to access a file, it logs the
error, skips the file, and tries to continue.

If settings requiring an integer argument (like -v or
--checkpoint-interval) are given a bad (non-integer) argument, fail
with better explanation.

Fixed annoying logging bug.  Now no matter which computer a logging
message originates on, it should be routed to the process which is
writing to the logging file, and written correctly.  However, logging
messages about network traffic will not be routed, as this will
generate more traffic and lead to an infinite regress.

When calling rdiff, uses popen2.Popen3 and os.spawnvp instead of
os.popen and os.system.  This should make rdiff-backup more secure.
Thanks to Jamie Heilman for the suggestion.

Instead of calling the external shell command 'stat', rdiff-backup
uses os.lstat().st_rdev to determine a device file's major and minor
numbers.  The new method should be more portable.  Thanks to Jamie
Heilman for the suggestion.

All the file operations were examined and tweaked to try to
minimize/eliminate the chance of leaving the backup directory in an
inconsistent state.

Upon catchable kinds of errors, try to checkpoint before exiting so
later rdiff-backup processes have more information to work with.

At the suggestion of Jason Piterak, added a --windows-time-format
option so rdiff-backup will (perhaps) work under MS windows NT.


New in v0.4.4 (2002/01/09)
--------------------------

Applied Berkan Eskikaya's "xmas patch" (I was travelling and didn't
have a chance on Christmas).  He fixed important bugs in the
--terminal-verbosity and --remove-older-than options.

Added an --exclude-device-files option, which makes rdiff-backup skip
any device files in the same way it skips files selected with the
--exclude option.


New in v0.4.3 (2001/12/17)
--------------------------

Plugged another memory hole.  At first I thought it might have been
python's fault, but it was all me.  If rdiff-backup uses more than a
few megabytes of memory, tell me because it is probably another memory
hole..

rdiff-backup is now a bit more careful about deleting temporary files
it creates when it is done with them.

Changed the rpm spec a little.  The enclosed man page is gzipped and
the package file is GPG signed (it can be checked with, for example,
"rpm --checksig -v rdiff-backup-0.4.3-1.noarch.rpm").

rdiff-backup no longer checks the mtimes or atimes of device files.
Use of these times was inconsistent (sometimes writing to device files
updates their times, sometimes not) and leads to unnecessary backing
up of files.


New in v0.4.2 (2001/11/19)
--------------------------

Significant speed increases (maybe 20% for local sessions) when
dealing with directories that do not need to be updated much.

Fixed memory leak.  rdiff-backup should now run in almost constant
memory (about 6MB on my system).

Enabled buffering of object transfers, so remote sessions can be
50-100%+ faster.

rdiff-backup now thinks it is running as root if the destination
connection is root.  Thus rdiff-backup will preserve ownership even if
it is not running as root on the source end.

If you abort rdiff-backup or it fails for some reason, it is now more
robust about recovering the next time it is run (before it could fail
in ways which made subsequent sessions fail also).  However, it is
still not a good idea to abort, as individual files could be in the
process of being written and could get corrupted.

If rdiff-backup encounters an unreadable file (or, if
--change-source-perms is given, a file whose permissions it cannot
change), it will log a warning, ignore the file, and continue, instead
of exiting with an error.


New in v0.4.1 (2001/11/9)
-------------------------

Now either the source, or the target, or both can be remote.  To make
this less confusing, now rdiff-backup supports host::file notation.
So it is legal to run:

rdiff-backup bill@host1.net::source_file jones@host2.net::target

Also, the test suites have been improved and found a number of bugs
(which were then fixed).


New in v0.4.0 (2001/11/4)
-------------------------

Much of the rdiff-backup internals were rewritten.  The result should
be better performance when operating remotely over a pipe with
significant latency.  Also the code dealing with changing permissions
is much cleaner, and should generalize later to similar jobs (for
instance preserving atimes.)

Listing and deleting increments and restoring should work remotely
now.  In earlier versions a file or directory had to be restored
locally and then copied over to its final destination.

At the request of the FSF, a copy of the GPL has been included in the
packaged distributions.  It is in the file "COPYING".


New in v0.3.4 (2001/10/31)
--------------------------

A change in python from the 2.2a series to 2.2b series made remote
backup on version 0.3.3 stop work, a small change fixes it.  (Thanks
to Berkan Eskikaya for telling me about this.)

Listed some missing features/bugs on the manual page.


New in v0.3.3 (2001/10/16)
--------------------------

Changed quoting system yet again after learning that the old system
was not very portable between shells (thanks Hans
<hguevremont@eternitee.com>)


New in v0.3.2 (2001/10/9)
-------------------------

Added --list-increments and --remove-older-than commands.
--list-increments will just tell you what increments you have and
their dates.  This isn't anything you couldn't get from "ls", but it
may be formatted more nicely.  The --remove-older-than command is used
to delete older increments that you don't want, or don't have space
for.

Also, on some systems ssh was adding a spurious "Broken pipe" message,
even though everything went fine.  Maybe this version will prevent
this confusing message.


New in v0.3.1 (2001/9/11)
-------------------------

Fix for stupid bug - when running remotely as users with different
uids, rdiff-backup now doesn't check the uid/gid.  Before it kept
thinking that the files needed to be updated because they didn't have
the right ownership.  This shouldn't have resulted in any data loss -
just some unnecessary .rdiff files.  (Thanks to Michael Friedlander
for finding this.)

Added check to make sure that rdiff exits successfully.


New in v0.3.0 (2001/9/9 - Billennium edition)
---------------------------------------------

rdiff-backup has been almost completely rewritten for v0.3.0, as it
was for v0.1.0.  The main problem with versions 0.2.x was that the
networking code was added to the not-remote-capable v0.1, and the
result was unyieldy and prone to bugs when operating over a pipe.

There are some new features:

- Hopefully very few bugs, at least in basic file handling.
  rdiff-backup has an extensive testing suite now, so it should be
  much more reliable.

- Complete support for reading and writing from and to files and
  directories that lack permissions, by temporarily changing them, and
  then changing them back later.  (See for instance the
  --change-source-perms switch.)  As I found out there is a lot to
  this, so much that I'm not sure in retrospect I should have
  bothered. :-)

- New more standard format for increment files.  See
  http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime for the time standard.  The old
  format, besides being less standard, didn't take timezones into
  account.

- In the initial mirroring, rdiff-backup only copies the files that it
  needs to, so it is much quicker when you almost have an initial
  mirror already.  You can even the --mirror-only switch and make
  rdiff-backup into a slow version of rsync.

- Terminal and file verbosity levels can be selected separately.  So
  if you like a lot in your backup.log/restore.log but not much on
  your terminal, or vice-versa, you can set them at different numbers.

- New --test-server option so if something goes wrong you can see if
  it is because the server on the other side isn't being initialized
  properly.

- New --no-rdiff-copy option, which disables using rdiff to move files
  across a connection (it will still be used to make increment files
  however).  If the bottleneck is not bandwidth but local disks/CPUs,
  this options should speed things up.

There are, however, a few negatives:

- rdiff-backup now requires Python version 2.2 or later.  Sorry for
  the inconvenience but I use the new features a lot.

- It may be slightly slower overall than versions 0.2.x - the remote
  code is cleaner, but probably has higher overhead.  At least on my
  computer, rdiff-backup is still quicker than rsync for local
  mirroring of large files, but for remote mirroring, rsync will
  usually be much quicker, because it uses a fairly low-overhead
  pipelining protocol.

- Any old increments are incompatible because they use a different
  date/time standard.  If this is a big deal, try mailing me.  A
  converter shouldn't be very difficult to write, but I didn't want to
  take the time unless someone really wanted it.


New in v0.2.8 (2001/9/4)
-------------------------

Fixed two stupid bugs that would cause rdiff-backup to exit with an
exception.  (I can't believe they were in there.)


New in v0.2.7 (2001/8/29)
-------------------------

Added new long options --backup-mode and --verbosity which are
equivalent to -b and -v.

rdiff-backup should be a little more resistant to the filesystem it is
backup up changing underneath it (although it is not setup to handle
this in general).  Thanks Alberto Accomazzi
<aaccomazzi@cfa.harvard.edu> for these suggestions.


New in v0.2.6 (2001/8/27)
-------------------------

Fixed bug where, for non-root users, rdiff-backup could, in the
process of mirroring an unwritable directory, make the copy
unwriteable and then fail.  Now rdiff-backup goes through and makes
what it needs to be readable and writeable, and then changes things
back at the end.  (Another one found by Jeb Campbell!)


New in v0.2.5 (2001/8/26)
-------------------------

Added better error reporting when server throws an exception.

Fixed bug so that backed-up setuid files will also be setuid.

Now rdiff-backup thinks it's running as root only if both client and
server are running as root (Thanks to Jeb Campbell for finding these
previous two bugs).

Fixed miscellaneous Path bug that could occur in remote operation.


New in v0.2.4 (2001/8/25)
-------------------------

Added more logging options that may help other track down a mysterious
bug.


New in v0.2.3 (2001/8/24)
-------------------------

Fixed typing bug that caused an Assertion Error in remote operation,
thanks again to Jeb Campbell for finding it.


New in v0.2.2 (2001/8/24)
-------------------------

Fixed bug in remote creation of special files and symlinks (thanks to
Jeb Campbell <jebc@c4solutions.net> for finding it).

Fixed another error report.


New in v0.2.1 (2001/8/7)
------------------------

Now if rdiff-backup isn't running as root, it doesn't try to change
file ownership.

Fixed an error report.

Stopped flushing an open pipe to fix a race condition on IRIX.


New in v0.2 (2001/8/3)
----------------------

rdiff-backup can now operate in a bandwidth efficient manner (a la
rsync) using a pipe setup with, for instance, ssh.

I was too hasty with the last bug fix and didn't deal with all
filenames properly.  Maybe this one will work.


New in v0.1.1 (2001/8/2)
-------------------------

Bug fix:  Filenames that may contain spaces, backslashes, and other
special characters are quoted now and should be handled correctly.


New in v0.1 (2001/7/15)
----------------------

Large portion (majority?) of rdiff-backup was rewritten for v0.1.  New
version highlights:

 -  No new features!
 -  No speed improvements!  It may even be slower...
 -  No bug fixes!  (ok maybe a few)

However, the new version is much cleaner and better documented.  This
version should have fewer bugs, and it should be easier to fix any
future bugs.