David Hill wrote:
If you want PostgreSQL, install it from the ports tree.
What is wrong with dump/restore and using tar for a backup solution?
Thank you, I am well aware of the fact that it can be installed from
the ports tree. Going back and _reading_ the original post, we find
that _that was not the question_; the question was "Is there any
reason this could not be made part of the OpenBSD release? What
design goals is such an action incompatible with?"
What is wrong with dump/restore/tar is that nobody running a network
larger than two computers uses it. Yes, I'm sure you can make it work
with plenty of Perl scripting, some clever use of cron and ssh, and
plenty of disk space. Nobody in their right mind wants to create such
a Frankenstein's monster, or to maintain it. Also, dump/restore/tar
et al. doesn't handle tape or pool management, so you get the limitless
joy of having to figure out which tapes/volumes can be safely expired -
woe betide you if you guess wrong! Oops, maybe there's data on all
the tapes that you need, so you can't reuse any of them. How do you
compact it? And so forth. I don't even want to _think about_ the
scripting that would require. Oh, did I mention that dump/restore
don't exist on anything but a Unix system?
Administrators don't want that; they want a daemon that they can change
the flags for in rc.conf from NO to "", tweak the config file for five
minutes, start the daemon, and feel the file-duplicating happiness as
their clients are backed up painlessly. This is what I propose.
I propose some default features - transparent encryption of backed-up
files, perhaps, maybe even SSL for transport - that would make it
a _secure_ backup solution that is usable over the big, bad Internet.
Again, looking at the original post, the database seemed to me to be
part and parcel of this, for efficiency reasons. As you might be
aware, you can't have a dependency outside the src/ tree; you can't
have an "OpenBAK" or whatever that pauses in the middle of make to
say "This requires PostgreSQL from the ports tree, go install it
and come back". Not gonna work. That compels the introduction of
a database as well.
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