BackupPC - a brief rant

[Timothy Murphy]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

>> What 4 bytes did it want to read, incidentally?

> AFAIK it's actually an error from rsync (I've seen it in rsnapshot as
> well, which is also rsync-based). Google for more.

Do you mean that rsync actually sent the message,
or that it was an error in rsync that motivated BackupPC to send it?

I've never had the message directly from rsync,
although I use it all the time.

Also, I'm pretty sure (but not certain)
that I've had the message from BackupPC for other reasons,
perhaps before rsync is called.

In any case, BackupPC must know that rsync has failed,
so it would be helpful if it added "Rsync failure" or some such.
I found recently that actually running the rsync command
specified in BackupPC (in Edit Config, on the web page)
the cause of the problem immediately became clear.

Incidentally, in defence of my rant, I've found that
when I actually try to trace an error message in the source -
I used to do this quite a lot with NetworkManager
when it used to send out error messages which just said
"Failure 27" or something like that -
I usually found that the cause was more or less obvious.

I wish developers would spend a moment when adding error messages, thinking
"Will this message actually help someone encountering this error
to correct the problem?"
As an example of a very rare program which does this well
I'm mention SELinux, which always suggests what one probably needs to do.






-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland