Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Future of rdiff-backup: Python 3 migration and project maintainership in general

[Eric L.]

Hello again (in the morning for me),

in more length and with a fresh mind, and after having gone through all
thread answers, let me give a lengthy position:

0. I'm the EricZolf referenced elsewhere, who has a branch finished for
Linux with the migration to Python 3. I'll post a note after this e-mail
into the PR 40 to prove it.

1. it's great to see that there is still a community of users, I didn't
realise, else I'd have communicated earlier. I'm now on the mailing list
so all is good.

2. I started the migration effort because I didn't want to lose my
backup tool once Python 2 is out of support, else I'm an IT guy with
quite a lot of Ansible background (Python!), one wife, 2 children, a
consulting job and little time, but making the best out of it.

3. Initially, I didn't want to create my own definitive fork but wanted
to give sol1 a chance to become active and take their job as maintainer
seriously. As Otto noticed, I wasn't very successful till now. I would
have given them the Summer to react and then I'd have gone my own way,
without a clear idea how to create a community.

4. Knowing now that there is still such a community alive (thanks to
Otto!), I'd suggest following approach:

a. I'll ping a last time sol1 and ask for their position.
b. In the meantime, review my PR, it's huge, no chance to merge anything
else before it's merged back into master.
c. I merge back into my master based on your feedback.
d. A last task is required before others can start and I would ask your
patience a last time: I want the whole code to be PEP8 conform before
others contribute to it, and I think (but open to discussion) that it's
best done if one person does it in one go.
e. Once this is done, I would second Patrick's suggestion and create an
rdiff-backup project, open it to the community and push my repository to
there for further common work (I wouldn't like to lose my repository
because I have 30+ issues I've created as I went through the code).

A few more side notes:

A. my PR isn't tested against Windows and Mac, feel free to test and
push fix PR against my branch on my repo and I'll merge (it should work,
never tried, else I'll merge manually). Please focus on regression bugs
that we get quickly this huge branch merged.
B. I'm fully with Patrick regarding CI/CD, if you know tox, you'll see
that I have a good start and one of my next moves would probably have
been to integrate tox with GitHub's pipeline.
C. This and anything else like web page, a mailing list we own, release
process, and pending issues, we can discuss together once we've agreed
on the big plan.

Let the discussion roll, happy to be here, happy to hear there are
others who care about rdiff-backup, thanks to Otto for kicking this!
Eric

On 27/07/2019 01:17, Eric L. wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just finished the migration of rdiff-backup to Python 3 after months of 
> work, improving at the same time the test framework. Anybody can check and 
> feedback at https://github.com/sol1/rdiff-backup/pull/40 without paying money
> 
> The quality seems equal to the version 1.2.8 packaged under Fedora, Windows 
> and Mac support wasn't a priority though. 
> 
> Feel free to save the Debian package, there is enough work for more people, 
> but we should avoid useless work and forks.
> 
> KR, Eric(Zolf)
> 
> On July 26, 2019 4:36:24 PM UTC, "Otto Kekäläinen" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> There has not been any new releases of rdiff-backup since 2009. If the
>> original maintainer does not intend to work on this project, could I
>> please be allowed to take over?
>>
>> I am a Debian Developer and active in multiple open source projects.
>> Our company supports many open source projects (seravo.com/opensource)
>> and since we also use rdiff-backup, I could get some funding and man
>> power to for example complete the Python3 migration. I know Python
>> well and have recently contributed Python code to AppArmor upstream,
>> so I think I am technically competent. With 20 years of open source
>> experience I believe I can be a good steward this project.
>>
>> Rdiff-backup is marked for autoremoval from Debian on August 8th. I
>> hope we could get some responses and activity on this soon so I have a
>> chance to save rdiff-backup in Debian.
>> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rdiff-backup
>>
>> That do you think?
>>
>> If you are in favor of this please let me know by starring
>> https://github.com/Seravo/rdiff-backup
>>
>> If I get more than 5 stars I will begin the Python 3 migration and
>> also pulling in the best commits from the existing forks that have had
>> most activity:
>> - https://github.com/ericzolf/rdiff-backup
>> - https://github.com/ardovm/rdiff-backup
>> - https://github.com/hosting90/rdiff-backup
>> - https://github.com/orangenschalen/rdiff-backup
>> (see https://github.com/sol1/rdiff-backup/network)
>>
>>
>> - Otto