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System Utilities

Bazaar has been replaced by Breezy

In Fedora 32, the breezy package for a version control system obsoletes the bzr and git-remote-bzr packages related to the Bazaar version control system. As a result, users who install bzr will receive breezy instead. The bzr command (Bazaar) will be provided as a symbolic link to the brz command (Breezy).

MariaDB 10.4

Fedora 32 provides the mariadb package 10.4, up from version 10.3 in Fedora 31.

Notable changes include:

  • The root and mysql users can log in without a password using the unix_socket authentication plugin.

  • Possibility to use more than one authentication plugins for each user account.

  • Support for user password expiry.

  • Implementation of the optimizer trace.

  • Performance increase in Unicode collations.

  • Various changes in syntax, variables and the InnoDB storage engine.

For full information about this release, see the official MariaDB release notes.

rdiff-backup 2.0.0

This new release has been made truly ready for the future, with a move to GitHub, Python 3 support, automated CI/CD pipeline on Travis, availability on PyPi and no known regression bugs compared to version 1.2.8/1.3.3.

We even found the time to add a few features for you (details in the change log):

  • Sparse files handling has become more efficient on file systems which support it.

  • More compressed file formats are kept as-is.

  • Have a look at the --no-fsync option to improve speed of backup (at the slight risk of data loss).

  • Reproducible builds are possible.

  • Verbosity can be set via environment variable RDIFF_BACKUP_VERBOSITY.

On the down side, we have to say that due to the many changes, rdiff-backup 2.x can’t communicate with older versions 1.x in client-server mode (but the repository formats remain compatible), so you’ll need to upgrade client and server at once.

Which brings us to the installation, described in details in the read me, but here’s the quick version:

  • On Fedora 32, in this distribution.

  • On Fedora 30 and 31 available as an update.

  • CentOS/RHEL 7 and 8, available as an update in EPEL

  • On Ubuntu, you may use Otto’s PPA repo.

  • Windows, download the asset rdiff-backup-2.0.0.win32exe.zip from here and unpack it somewhere in your PATH.

  • Any other supported platform, use pip install rdiff-backup (or download and install the proper asset from here).

If you encounter issues, log a ticket in Bugzilla, contact us on the rdiff-backup-users mailing list and/or report an issue.

Happy backup, and remember: no backup, no pity!

apt package rebased from apt-rpm to Debian’s apt

Before Fedora 32, the apt package did not use the mainline apt software from Debian, but instead the apr-rpm fork. It had the advantage of allowing users to use apt-get commands in the terminal and use them to install packages from Fedora’s DNF repositories. This was useful because a lot of tutorials online use apt-get.

By switching the Fedora apt package from apt-rpm to regular apt we move from a dead to a living upstream. We also close security holes and introduce a critical dependency for more packages from the DPKG ecosystem. It is already possible to build Deb packages in Fedora, including with pbuilder, an equivalent for mock in the DPKG ecosystem, however pbuilder uses debootstrap to provision a build environment. While we may lose the ability to apt-get install Fedora packages from the command line, we also open the gate for sbuild, another mock equivalent to build Debs in a clean environment. This change offers more options to target Debian and derivative systems without leaving the Fedora comfort zone.

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