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When making a backup, use the same checksum for any chunks it re-uses
or creates. This is for performance: if we allowed two checksums to be
used, we would have to compute the checksum for a chunk twice, and
potentially look up both on the server. This is just a lot of work.
Instead, we use only one. The trade-off here is that when (not if) the
user wants to switch to a new checksum type, they'll have to do a full
backup, uploading all their data to the server, even when it's already
there, just with a different checksum. Hopefully this will be rare.
Full backups always use the built-in, hardcoded default checksum, and
incremental backups use whatever the previous backup used. The default
is still SHA256, but this commit add code to support BLAKE2 if we
decide to switch that as a default. It's also easy to add support for
others, now. BLAKE2 was added to verify that Obnam can actually handle
the checksum changing (manual test: not in the test suite).
I don't think users need to be offered even the option of choosing a
checksum algorithm to use. When one cares about both security and
performance, choosing a checksum requires specialist, expert
knowledge. Obnam developers should choose the default. Giving users a
knob they can twiddle just makes it that much harder to configure and
use Obnam. If the choice Obnam developers have made is shown to be
sub-optimal, it seems better to change the default for everyone,
rather than hope that every user changes their configuration to gain
the benefit.
Experience has shown that people mostly don't change the default
configuration, and that they are especially bad at choosing well when
security is a concern.
(Obnam is free software. Expert users can choose their checksum by
changing the source code. I'm not fundamentally limiting anyone's
freedom or choice here.)
Users can switch to a new default algorithm by triggering a full
backup with the new "obnam backup --full".
Sponsored-by: author
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Serialized labels now start with a type prefix: a character that says
what type of label it is.
This isn't strictly required: we _can_ just decide to always use a
single type of checksum for all chunks in one backup, for one client,
or in the whole repository. However, if it's ever possible to have
more than one type, it helps debugging if every checksum, when
serialized, is explicit about its type.
Change things to use the new serialize method instead of the Display
trait for Label. We're primarily serializing labels so they can be
stored in a database, and used in URLs, only secondarily showing them
to users.
Sponsored-by: author
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