rdiff-backup and APT-Pinning

I ran into a problem yesterday. Having upgraded Lobsang to the soon-to-be-released Jaunty, my server, running 8.10 failed to backup my desktop machine using rdiff-backup. It looks like it is caused by a conflict between the two versions of rdiff-backup.

Thanks to a comment from Defenestration I think something called APT-Pinning might be a good solution where you have multiple versions of Ubuntu. So here’s a question for all you Ubunteros out there:

Would APT-Pinning be a good solution here? If yes, which way round:

* Pin rdiff-backup to the oldest version in your network,
* or run the latest rdiff on the older Ubuntu releases?

Am looking forward to your responses.

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3 Comments

  • albinootje says:

    That depends.
    If you have only Jaunty and Intrepid machines, then I’d rather try to backport rdiff-backup from Jaunty source to an Intrepid package.
    Sometimes backporting is really easy when the program is rather simple, and the dependencies for the program are minimal. Add the source deb lines for the newer Ubuntu release. Run “sudo apt-get update”, and then take a look at “sudo apt-get build-dep rdiff-backup” and “sudo apt-get -b source rdiff-backup”. You’ll find out whether backporting it is easy or not that easy đŸ™‚

    • Alan Lord says:

      @albinootje

      Thanks for the comment. After reporting my results to this existing bug launchpad a kind soul offered a great solution for me. He maintains a PPA where there is a common version (usually the latest) of rdiff-backup for all releases from Gutsy through Jaunty. This is working fine for me.

  • albinootje says:

    Great that you now have the same versions of rdiff-backup packages available. Thanks for the update.

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