[rdiff-backup-users] a windows release and some questions

[David Kempe]

Hi People,
I have prepared a release of 0.13.4 for windows. Its just a package with all
the cygwin bits and an installer.
http://sol1.net/~dave/backup/rdiff-backup0.13.4w3.exe
Please read the readme accompanying the file its pretty important.
I have fixed up a few things with the batch file that comes with it so it
shouldn't break anyone's cyginw installs anymore (too badly). I'm a bit more
happy about the quality of this release - but it probably violates the
Cygwin rules - the readme text covers some of it, but I need the Cygwin
sources for everyone to be really happy.

I also have a few problems with rdiff-backup on windows that I have found.
1) for some reason the metadata file is not being written to the destination
(linux).
so backing up from win32 -> linux rdiff-backup complains about no metadata
file on the destination existing.
This means the backup parses the files each time and attempts to upload the
metadata on every single backup.
The metadata file IS being created on the destination, just when
rdiff-backup runs on windows, it can't detect it for some reason. I can send
the mirror_metadata file if needed.
Also this means when running the new --compare option it gives this error:

Warning, metadata file not found.
Metadata will be read from filesystem.
Fatal Error: Mirror metadata not found
Cleaning up

2) We have made great progress on the rdiff-backup web interface for
restoring.
However it would be good if we could direct rdiff-backup to restore a file
to stdout - that way we could pipe files back to users instead of using a
temp directory. How much work would it be to add this feature - one of my
guys is having a bash now, but doens't know python that well, so its
probably not going to be a great effort :-) Ben, if you could add restore to
standard out as a feature on linux at least, we will try and see if we can
get the company sponsoring the devel of the web interface to open source
some of it at least.

3) Writing to a windows file system still doesn't work for some reason. I
have written another email about this, but for the purpose of completion of
this email, I include it here. File system detection is now fixed in 0.13.4
so rdiff-backup passses that ok, but it complains about missing metadata and
crashes. Odds on the cause for this is the same as the cause for 1). I would
be happy if there was an option to just ignore metadata altogether, the
cygwin problems make dealing with permissions, symlinks and other fancy
attributes pretty hard.
Here is an extract from a metadata file from windows:

File .
  Type dir
  ModTime 1075190424
  Uid -1
  Uname None
  Gid 401
  Gname mkpasswd
  Permissions 448
File ASEQuery.dll
  Type reg
  Size 6144
  ModTime 1036284752
  Uid -1
  Uname None
  Gid 401
  Gname mkpasswd
  Permissions 448

The Gname being mkpasswd means that cygwin can't tell what permissions are
on that file. The UID -1 means the same. This will happen for any FAT32
partition, or any NTFS partition with a Samba server or slightly dodgy
sharing. Basically, on windows, we have to choose not to care about
permissions (uid, uname, gid, gname, permissions) at all. If we could add
something that did that as a workaround the inherent problems with cygwin,
that would be awesome. I am sure that most of the people using rdiff-backup
for windows are not going to care about permissions so much as their data.

thanks for a great release tho Ben,

Dave Kempe