Remove hubackup from repositories (no GUI restore!)

Do this in before releasing Jaunty. I have no time to fix hurestore any time soon and I have not heard something from Sivan in a while (not that I tried, but anyway). From my perspective, development has ceased.

While the backup GUI works in some basic cases, the restore gui doesn't work at all. As stated before, you need dar on the command line to get your data back.

Please could you email Sivan and see if hubackup is dead? I suggest leaving him a couple of weeks to respond and then if you hear nothing, proceeding to remove hubackup from Jaunty. It seems buggy and unfinished, and if it is not going to get any move love then there's no point in distributing it.

I will remain subscribed to this bug to hear the outcome.

Thanks for your time.

The issue of removing the package from the archives has nothing to do with HUBackup being dead or not. It's still developed AFAIK, but slowly, and no visible progress has been made for several Ubuntu releases (see bug 64594). You can't hope it will be fixed in Jaunty. It must absolutely be removed since it's broken for now, and that does not prevent it from coming back as soon as it's ready. On the contrary, leaving it makes it a really bad reputation.

Is there a chance to have this fixed instead?

Don't count on it:
hubackup 0.0.8
Published in jaunty-release on 2008-10-31
Published in intrepid-release on 2008-04-28
Published in hardy-release on 2008-01-30

No work has been taking place for more than a year, so even if hubackup is not dead (which would be nice), we must remove it for now. Jaunty is coming quite soon.

If you need a graphical backup/restore tool, DéjàDup can be an alternative (among others).

A fix is not really easy. I explained that a bit in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hubackup/+bug/64594/comments/26 . An easy solution would be to interface dar with the commandline but that is quite slow for large archives. A direct interface over the library would be much better, but you need someone who can create python bindings for c++ libraries. There are not a lot of people who will be able to that until Jaunty is released both because of time and expertise. Even after coding the interface part, you still need to code the UI part.

 I have been contacted by someone that wishes to publishe a call for volunteers in the rdiff-backup MLs and see the response. Can't we find someone interested to help ? I would be happy to direct and help where I can in porting it to use rdiff-backup and close the loose ends, but I can not put coding time into it for various personal reasons.

Lets remove this - the rationale looks sane. If it gets more love in the future, it can go back into the archives.

Subscribing u-a.

2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO Removing candidates:
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty amd64
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty armel
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty hppa
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty i386
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty ia64
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty lpia
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty powerpc
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO hubackup 0.0.8 in jaunty sparc
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO Removed-by: Steve Kowalik
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO Comment: no gui restore, not updated upstream in over a year; LP: #320797
2009-03-01 10:22:06 INFO 9 packages successfully removed.

For those looking for simple DVD/CD backup functionality in Jaunty, try the 'pybackpack' package.