[Pybackpack] pybackpack thoughts and future

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 20:05 -0400, Russell Harrison wrote:
> On 8/24/07, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't know if you want to use the NM dispatcher scripts... or have a
> > pybackpack daemon be dbus aware.  I think having a pybackpack dbus
> > aware entity makes the most sense going forward. Something like the
> > notifier that Seth has mentioned could be made dbus-aware and act on
> > any number of events, usb, network what-have-you.  It also lets you
> > send inhibit events to the power management i think. That way if a
> > backup is in progress, you can inhibit suspend.  You really want
> > automation like this tied to a desktop notifier, or else you don't get
> > any feedback tell you its active.  A cmdline utility, is most useful
> > for legacy usage...like cron. If we want to do event triggers then
> > pybackpack should grow d-bus awareness for best long term impact.
> 
> I didn't know about inhibit events!  Thats very cool.  Obviously,
> you're right about using dbus for this type of thing.  I was thinking
> more in the short term, something quick and dirty.  With all of great
> ideas being batted around its almost a problem of "drinking the
> ocean".
> 

Boiling/drinking the ocean problems always abound. The little things I
can see that show progress would be:

- simple gnome-python applet that the user can run and have it poll
their backupsets and say if a backup hasn't been run in whatever amount
of time. Storing the minimum frequency in the backupset config would
accommodate that. - So the things that would need to happen to make this
work: 
    - backupsets need to write/touch a file in their config dir when 
      they finish a backup
    - we need a default 'minimum frequency' in the config - probably 24 
      or 48 hours would be reasonable.
    - and, of course, we need the applet. The simplest applet displays 
      nothing until it notices that one of the backups has not been 
      backed up in less time than its minimum frequency. Then it should 
      probably:
          - blink an icon up on the applet notification area
          - clicking on the icon pops up a box telling the user what 
            needs to be done with a button to run pybackpack

Unless I'm badly mistaken the above is not very much code.

-sv