May I present my REX about the policy change. I choose bareos in 2018 because it was recommended by the French Government. We are a French High School, with our own datacenter. My team operates 100 virtual machines and nearly 20 physical ones for hosting web sites and applications. Some of them are very very old. My oldest is Debian 3.1 ! Please don't laught. It's realy hard to maintain and to keep secure. Old stuffs with huge amount of data cost a lot to move to modern versions. The main word is if it's works don't fix it. That's why we need old bareos versions.
My oldest bareos client version is 15. Directory and Storage are running version 19.2.7 on Debian 9 and Debian 10. I'd like to move the director and storage to Debian 12 / Bareos 22, but we have higher priorities. It's not planned yet. The policy change on old version repository broke all my automatic bareos deployment over those 100 virtual machines and 20 physical hosts. And bareos version 22 is only available for maintained Linux distributions. I was only aware of the policy change after analysing the broken situation. Killing old software is a serious issue for the open source world. I am wondering about compiling and packaging our .deb packages for old debian versions with an accurate bareos version, may be opening a public debian repository for that. Or leaving bareos... Having to pay to have acces to old version is not fair. But paying for having accurate versions on old linux distribution would awesome. Best regards. Nicolas / HWID DUNES Team / Lyon / France Le mercredi 31 mai 2023 à 11:42:37 UTC+2, Andreas Rogge a écrit : Am 31.05.23 um 10:15 schrieb Willem Basson: > Indeed, we had 18 months. But we didn't know that we had 18 months, > because old versions were historically still available, so readying > ourselves for Bareos upgrades hasn't featured as the most important > thing to do yet. We made a temporary plan by pulling old packages out > of our backups for the time being. I'm glad you found a solution that works for you right now. We also realize that a lot of people are running old version of Bareos (a lot of people still seem to run 17.2). What we're trying to do is to "push" the community to switch to the latest version, so we get more feedback on that. Breaking anyone's Bareos setup was definitely not one of our goals! > What would have been great, is for at least a short period of time, > there was also a 'previous' repo at downloads.bareos.org. Even a month > or 3 would suffice. Right now, there is now way to cleanly and > confidently move servers from one version to another. But I totally > understand if your reasoning is that we need to pay if we need that > functionality, since you don't recommend using the community version in > production. We announced that change. On December 19th 2022 when the new release policy was announced, we clearly stated that outdated and discontinued versions of Bareos will be removed from the download server. That new release policy was also mentioned in the press release for Bareos 22. While the policy change basically stated that old packages would go away immediately, we left the packages there for more than four months so people had some time to adapt and migrate. I somehow feel that we're bad at communicating stuff like that, because a lot of people seem to not have noticed before the packages actually went away. If anybody has an idea how we can improve on that, please go ahead and tell us! > Maybe I should reach out to sales about bulk licensing? That would be nice. I spoke to sales yesterday and explained your situation. If you reach out to them, I'm pretty sure they can come up with some kind of solution that works for you. Best Regards, Andreas -- Andreas Rogge andrea...@bareos.com Bareos GmbH & Co. KG Phone: +49 221-630693-86 http://www.bareos.com Sitz der Gesellschaft: Köln | Amtsgericht Köln: HRA 29646 Komplementär: Bareos Verwaltungs-GmbH Geschäftsführer: Stephan Dühr, Jörg Steffens, Philipp Storz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "bareos-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bareos-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bareos-users/960c4513-0519-467d-aa00-e142b7d7357cn%40googlegroups.com.
