Re: Backward compatibility of next beta

[Arrigo Marchiori]

Hello,

On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 10:28:14AM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:

> On Thu, January 30, 2020 10:12 am, Reio Remma wrote:
> > On 30/01/2020 17:01, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >>
> >> I've got a dozen machines of various vintages that I'm trying to backup
> >> from a centralized backup server.  Not all of those machines support
> >> Python 3, and it's quite possible that, down the road, some may support
> >> Python 3 but not Python 2.  I absolutely, cannot guarantee that both
> >> ends can always run the same version of rdiff-backup, and frankly I
> >> shouldn't have to.
> >
> >
> > Shouldn't it be possible to run multiple versions on the backup machine?
> >
> > iirc I had both Python 2 and 3 versions installed on a CentOS 7 machine
> > at one point.
> 
> Arguably yes, this would work, but it would IMHO require that the backup
> server have software that automatically detected the correct remote
> version and ran the appropriate frontend.  I would be okay with that
> solution for now, provided it was part of the 2.0 package (and that the
> packaging is such that 1.2.8 and 2.0 can co-exist on the backup server
> easily).

About the packaging: it should be possible to use PyInstaller to make
single-executable distributions of rdiff-backup for Linux. That is
what happens for Windows.

In this way, if you have many computers running on ``old'' Linux
distributions, you would need to install Python 3 just into one of
them, use it to build the executable, and then only copy the
rdiff-backup self-contained executable file into all the other ones.

Best regards,
-- 
rigo

http://rigo.altervista.org