nssbackup-team team mailing list archive

[Jean-Peer Lorenz <peer.loz@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

in order to document the schedule feature I had a deeper look into it
and discovered some issues I want to discuss: The currently implemented
scheduling doesn't work properly and is quite confusing/messy.

I've fixed some obvious bugs related to this so far:

* I moved the 'max. incremental backups in days' from the time tab/page
to the general page since this is not related to scheduling at all.
* I disabled the scheduling for non-default profiles since they can
overwrite schedule settings made in the default profile and this can be
very confusing.
* I fixed some issues with updating of the cron services.

These changes are not pushed upstream so far.


What I intend to do for the series 0.2 is to simplify the schedule UI
even more:

* I suggest to remove the *precise* settings for
hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backups completely from the UI. I think we
should keep only the *simple* settings and the custom setting. The
reason is that precise scheduling is always loaded as a custom setting
(when opening such configuration again) and this is hard to fix in
series 0.2. For average users a simple setting on a
hourly/daily/weekly/monthly base would be sufficient and experienced
users (assuming they know what a cronline is) can still define their own
custom setting. There are better ways that should be implemented
(crontab) for later releases and it is not necessary to spend too much
effort to fix this in 0.2 since it keeps a hack and lacks support for
non-root users.

* Moreover, I suggest to simplify the general backup settings on the
main page. The current implementation is buggy and misleading. My idea
is to remove the radio button for 'Manual backups only' completely and
to keep only the choices for 'recommended' and 'custom' backups. I think
this is much clearer than it is now. The problem that remains is that
for non-root users we cannot set up daily backups as a recommended
setting in 0.2. So, either we also modify the description for
'recommended settings' on the main page for non-root users or remove it
completely.

In general:
* For release 0.2 we should provide a simple but working application as
fast as possible and then implement new features like scheduling for
root/non-root users in 0.3. This means, we should not try to fix every
aspect in 0.2 rather making it working well (even if some features a
missing or get cut) and then go on with the development of the project
(I really want to see the notification working in a release - this would
be a huge improvement in usability ;-)

What do you think? I'm looking forward to your thoughts.

Regards.
Jean-Peer

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil