43 weeks agoS3 Backup Beta 15 and New Release Plan

I’m glad to report we are issuing new S3 Backup releases. As I was planning out the Release Candidate and 1.0 releases one thing bugged me — there are so many changes, that it’s almost a completely new application, and that could result in some new bugs as well. While I’m confident that there’s nothing too serious, the latest betas were of such a high quality that this new release might have come out as less reliable at first.

To make sure the transition is as smooth as possible I picked a different strategy: we’ll start where we left off and will introduce new components incrementally. So welcome our first new release in a while, S3 Backup beta 15 rev.1159. This first iteration should look and work the same way beta 14 does, the difference being that all the external libraries we use were upgraded to their current version, a few very minor internal changes were made and the fact that we switched over to Python 2.6. None of that should be noticeable to a user.

We will be moving towards the current code in small increments to make sure any possible corner cases can be worked out as we go. That is, we encourage you to update your installation to every new release as it comes out, but knowing that there will be a lot of those in the coming weeks.

As I was preparing this release I had to work with our beta 14 code and had an opportunity to compare to our current codebase — it’s no exaggeration to say that literally every component was improved and lots and lots of work was done since last public beta. The plan is to take the old components out one by one replacing them with our current, new and shiny ones. That will manifest in a new release once every few days, with each revision getting an announcement here with explanations of what’s new and different.

We’ll also start taking preorders for the 1.0 version soon, so stay tuned.