At the urging of @ts678, I’ll do one simple answer: the available work capability versus the amount of work needed to simply keep the show running is just to small to talk of plans, milestones, and all these things. Here are my estimates of the capabilities of team Duplicati 2 years ago: 10x developer = 1, 3x developer = 1, 1x developer = 2. That means a work capability of 15. This was not enough to complete the Net5 move or fix grave persistent problems.
Currently it’s 1 x 0.2x developer (hopefully if I manage to get better it could inch toward 1 x 1x developer). Even in the wildly optimistic scenario of adding 1 3x developer there is no way that drawing plans is something else than a waste of time.
I am closed on further discussions on this subject.
@gpatel-fr I’m trying to work out how to make a difference, I see your point and can leave that alone. What are clear things that a developer could do to make things better?
I’m just not understanding how to help.
First do no harm. Any regression is more work for the forum support (@ts678) and the interim maintainer (that is me). I need all my available time to read and understand more of this code base. Anything touching core duplicati (touching the on disk structure and database) is extremely risky and should absolutely not be changed in any way until there is a capability to read and understand and fix quickly most important Duplicati code. Anything else touching basic duplicati function (backup and restore) is very risky and should be changed only with great care and testing.
My plans for the following months:
- canary 106 with the one Mac fix
- beta (== canary 106)
- tutorial for building and running a local build of Duplicati
- more reading and understanding Network code, especially the OAuth part.
- fix the tests
- begin a stab at getting things on Net5: build and run locally the @tsuckow version; do a tutorial for it; try to run the tests on it; try to fix problems; get the 2 versions nearer on the old Duplicati version
- possible aims for Canary 107: upgrade to Net 4.7.2 ? more library updates ? a few bug fixes carefully selected for the most bang and minimal risk ?
If you want to help at fixing the tests, the remaining problem I have begun to look at this morning is the disruptions.stopnow test. I have just begun to read code, not even tried to do a change. I am not sure that it is a general problem, but I suspect that it may be a problem that has crept on this forum - there are a few references to people trying to stop a backup and failing. From the Github tests and my own local testing, this happens mostly on Windows, and especially on Win10 (repro is easy on Win10, hard on Windows server 2022). It may be a system problem, or a core Duplicati problem. I think it to be a hard problem and I am happy to tackle it, but if you want I have quite a lot of other things to do as explained higher, and it happens rarely enough on Win server 2022 to not be a blocking problem for Github testing.