partimage (was: Re: package criteria)

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 19:51 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 13:23:37 -0500, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> 
> > Currently, partimage is available on the DAG repository.  Should partimage be 
> > included in Fedora Extras?  The partimage package appears to be included in 
> > some other distributions such as mandrake and debian and I, personally, 
> > believe it is a good package.  However, there has been little recent 
> > development activity and it may be orphaned.
> 
> Please join here:
> https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=518

Gotchas about partimage, some apply to partition backup/restore software
in general:

In order to be able to backup partitions, they must usually be
unmounted.  And obviously, incompatible changes between versions in
backup/restore software are a no go; I've heard of such changes in
partimage.  There's a partition image server included in the partimage
package, but it's pretty damn fugly (ditto the rest of the package's
contents, FWIW), and is of doubtful usefulness because
NFS/SMB/$younameit mounts work well enough for storing the backups.

Given those limitations, I'm not sure if it makes sense to include
partimage in Extras.  Feel free to disagree, but be also prepared to
take package maintainership :)  If nobody steps up, I'll close the above
b.f.u submission soon(tm).

partimage is not at all useless, but IMO it's better off used from
somewhere else than the base distro (includes Extras in this context).
I've used it with good results from a Knoppix CD, where the mountedness
of partitions to be backed up is not a problem, nor can any version
changes occur as long as one keeps the same ISO/CD handy.