Message-Id: <1502992882.4101217.1076717680.35C833C0@webmail.messagingengine.com>
From: Biltong <biltong@fastmail.fm>
To: Obnam support <obnam-support@obnam.org>
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Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 20:01:22 +0200
References: <20170813184758.hbel3jxgultskktu@liw.fi>
In-Reply-To: <20170813184758.hbel3jxgultskktu@liw.fi>
Subject: Re: [obnam-announce] Retiring Obnam
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Thanks for your hard work Lars. obnam is a great tool, and you have
inspired other great tools.

-- 
  Biltong
  biltong@fastmail.fm

On Sun, Aug 13, 2017, at 08:47 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> This is a difficult announcement to write. The summary is that you
> should switch to another backup program in the coming months.
> 
> The first commit to Obnam's current code base is this:
> 
>     commit 7eaf5a44534ffa7f9c0b9a4e9ee98d312f2fcb14
>     Author: Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>
>     Date:   Wed Sep 6 18:35:52 2006 +0300
> 
>         Initial commit.
> 
> It's followed by over 5200 more commits until the latest one, which is
> from yesterday. The NEWS file contains 58 releases. There are 20761
> lines of Python, 15384 words in the English language manual, with
> translations in German and French. The yarn test suite, which is a
> kind of a manual, is another 13382 words in English and
> pseudo-English. That's a fair bit of code and prose. Not all of it
> mine, I've had help from some wonderful people. But most of it mine.
> 
> I wrote all of that because backups were fun. It was pleasing to use
> my own program to guarantee the safety of my own data. The technical
> challenges of implmenting the kind of backup program I wanted were
> interesting, and solving interesting problems is a big part of why 
> I am a programmer.
> 
> Obnam has a kind user base. It's not a large user base: the Debian
> "popularity contest" service estimates it at around 500. But it's a
> user base that is kind and has treated me well. I have tried to
> reciprocate.
> 
> Unfortunately, I have not had fun while developing Obnam for some time
> now. This has changed. A few years ago, I lived in Manchester, UK, and
> commuted by train to work. It was a short train ride, about 15
> minutes. At times I would sit on the floor with my laptop on my knees,
> writing code or the manual. Back then Obnam was a lot of fun. I was
> excited, and enthusiastic.
> 
> In the past two years or so, I've not been able to feel that
> excitement again. My native language, Finnish, has an expression
> describing unpleasant tasks: something is as much fun as drinking tar.
> That describes Obnam in recent years for me.
> 
> Obnam has not turned out well, from a maintainability point of view.
> It seems that every time I try to fix something, I break something
> else. Usuaully what breaks is speed or memory use: Obnam gets slower
> or starts using even more memory.
> 
> For several years now I've been working on a new repository format for
> Obnam, code names GREEN ALBATROSS. It was meant to solve Obnam's
> problems as far as extensibility, performance, and resource use were
> concerned. It seems to have failed.
> 
> I'm afraid I've had enough. I'm going to retire Obnam as a project and
> as a program, and move on to doing something else, so I can feel
> excitement and pleasure again.
> 
> After some careful thought, I fear that the maintainability problems
> of Obnam can realistically only be solved by a complete rewrite from
> scratch, and I'm not up to doing that.
> 
> If you use Obnam, you should migrate to some other backup solution.
> Don't worry, you have until the end of the year. I will be around and
> I intend to fix any serious bugs in Obnam; in particular, security
> flaws. But you should start looking for a replacement sooner rather
> than later.
> 
> I will be asking Obnam to be removed from the Debian unstable and
> testing branches. The next Debian release (buster, Debian 10) won't
> include Obnam.
> 
> The Obnam mailing lists are kindly hosted by Daniel Silverstone, and
> they will remain, but later this year I will change them to be
> moderated. The Obnam git repository will remain. The web site will
> remain, but I will add a note that Obnam is no longer maintained.
> Other Obnam online resources may disappear.
> 
> If you would like to take over the Obnam project, and try to resolve
> the various issues, please contact me to discuss that.
> 
> Thank you, and may you never need to restore.
> _______________________________________________
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> obnam-announce@obnam.org
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