Hello, This Bacula status report will discuss the following items: - Up coming Release 3.0.2 - Discontinuing version 2.4.x - Bacula Enterprise Edition - Foundation Course - Email problems - New development strategy
Up coming Release 3.0.2: We have been working on bug fixes and a few minor new features that are going into version 3.0.1, and if all goes well, we will release version 3.0.2 sometime shortly after mid-July. In the mean time, the SVN seems quite stable. There are still a number of bugs outstanding, and we hope to fix most of them in the next two weeks. Discontinuing version 2.4.x: As I previously discussed, we are discontinuing version 2.4.x. This is because we are focusing all our Bacula project effort on the current trunk (3.0.x). As a consequence version 2.4.4 will no longer be supported; we will no longer produce pataches for it; and bugs will only be considered if they seem to be relevant to the current development version (3.0.x). This doesn't mean we will have extra time on our hands, because we are effectively replacing the old 2.4.x branch by the Bacula Enterprise Edition (see the next item). Bacula Enterprise Edition: As I noted in a previous email (quite a while ago), Bacula Systems will be releasing a version of Bacula that will be targeted for the enterprise market -- in fact, high end enterprises. It will be announced shortly and will be called the Bacula Enterprise Edition. This version of Bacula will effectively replace the old 2.4.x branch. As you probably know, many "commercial" branches of Open Software projects add additional features to their enterprise editions and do not release the source code -- they effectively take a major portion of the project proprietary. This will not be the case with the Bacula project and Bacula Systems -- all the code we develop will be released. In fact, the Enterprise Edition will have fewer features than the "community" version. So, if you want to use the enterprise edition, you will be able to, but the Bacula project already has its hands full with the development stream, so we will not be supporting it. The closest analogy to Bacula - Bacula Systems is Fedora - Red Hat, where you can get the source code for both, but if you want support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux version, you must have a subscription. Some of you may not want to hear about enterprise stuff, and I can understand that. I will try to avoid "commercial" messages as much as possible on these lists, but Bacula Systems and the enterprise market are very important to me for two main reasons: 1. I am spending a lot of time on enterprise stuff 2. I believe the enterprise market (with their financial weight) is the key to getting a host of new and interesting features into Bacula. If you read my 3.0.0 release message, you should have gotten a good appreciation for the number of new features that were sponsored by enterprises for that version. Foundation course: Over the past 6 months I have been devoting a large fraction of my time to develop Bacula training, which is critical for the enterprise market. The first part -- a Bacula Foundation Course is now ready, and the next course will be given by me in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, the 7th, 8th, and 9th of July. This course if for people who do not yet know Bacula (if you have built and installed it, this is not a course for you). If you are interested, please see the Bacula web site (www.bacula.org) or the Bacula Systems web site (www.baculasystems.com). I am now beginning work on the Advanced Course, which should interest many of you, but I expect that it will take 4-6 months before this course will be ready. Email problems: I've been having serious problems with email lately for two reasons: 1. I have not received a good number of emails sent to me. 2. The emails are coming into my inbox faster than I can deal with them. Problem 1 seems to be due to the fact that my backup relay server stopped relaying email. Thanks to Marco for figuring this out -- it was very annoying and should now be fixed. Problem 2 isn't getting much better, but hopefull will over the next month or two. Bottom line: I am sorry if you sent me email and I have not reponded. If this is the case please ping me as I may have never received your email. New development strategy: One part of development that has always bothered me was when we get close to a release, we must slow down, and finally "freeze" the development SVN to ensure that the new release is stable. I've taken a good look at Open Source tools that can alleviate a lot of these problems -- in particular Bazaar and Git, and after a lot of thought, we will be converting the base part of the Bacula source repository from Subversion to Git. If all goes well this will happen around mid-July. If you currently use our SVN repository to pull versions of Bacula, you should have absolutely no problem switching to git. However, if you are a developer and do commits, using git is a whole different story -- it is much more powerful, and thus different from Subversion and consequently more complicated. I would recommend to all developers to start learning git. Best regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
