Re: EPEL packages for CentOS6/7

[Frank Crawford]

On Sun, 2020-05-10 at 09:40 +0100, John Harman wrote:
> I see that the Rdiff-backup 2.0 update has pushed out to CentOS 7 servers
> via EPEL overnight (on a Saturday night - great timing!).
> 
> In my case this has broken several backups because the CentOS 6 backup
> master pulls from the child servers which are mostly CentOS 7.
> 
> Browsing the EPEL repositories I can't see any sign of RPM packages to
> allow me to install Rdiff-backup 2.x on CentOS 6.

No, unfortunately it is not possible to make an EPEL version of rdiff-
backup 2.x, as python3 is not available directly within CentOS 6,
however see below.

> Am I missing something and if not short of an urgent upgrade of every
> remaining CentOS 6 server what options do I (and I'm sure many like me)
> have.

The simplest fix is to downgrade the CentOS 7 rdiff-backup to the
previous release and exclude rdiff-backup until you are prepared to do
an upgrade.  Note that there will never be an upgrade to rdiff-backup
1.2.8 so no new python 2 RPM will ever be released.

There has also just been added to the docs on the Rdiff-backup website
describing how to upgrade to rdiff-backup 2 on CentOS 6 using SCL. 
This may be an option for you, but it is not available as an RPM.

Finally, if you can get rdiff-backup 2 working on your main backup
server, as well as keeping the RPM of rdiff-backup, you can look at
some of the other discussions about how to handle a mixed client
environment.

> Thanks
> 
> John

Regards
Frank