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Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

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Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#91

Post by Aurornis »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
LetMeLogin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why are you gatekeeping this? People can't comment now that they are sad because of what happened?

Gatekeeping?!? Those that paid , or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad. Others should consider this is what happens to that lego piece in Nebraska, when no one contributes, and everyone uses it.

> Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.

I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.

I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#92

Post by drcongo »

radimm wrote: post #76

This is the message the author posted on LinkedIn: After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by nu…

That text is right there in the link, we don't need to read it twice.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#94

Post by zigzag312 »

joshmn wrote: post #25

I have a moderately sized 2TB production database I have enjoyed using pgBackRest on, and was—this week—going to set it up on another 8TB database we have. What's the next-closest thing? wal-g? barman? databasus? I only get to cosplay as a DBA.

pg_probackup seems to be another one.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#95

Post by freedomben »

rolfvandekrol wrote: post #62
freedomben wrote: post #55

> TL;DR: pgBackRest is no longer being maintained. If you fork pgBackRest, please select a new name for your project. > I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did. I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There…

From the story told in the README it is clear this is a project ran by a single person. There is no wider maintenance team that can be trusted with continuing the project. So anyone who offers to take up the maintenance will be unknown to the current maintainer and cannot automatically be trusted. The alternative to this seemingly bitter approach is handing over the trust they built to some unknown person who can do…

Sure, but what if someone from the postgres team decided they wanted to step up? The door is completely shut for that now. And if we can't trust someone from the postgres team to do it, then who can we trust?

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#96

Post by thinkingtoilet »

bdcravens wrote: post #75

"so sad to see this" The source is still available. Maintaining your own copy and/or paying someone to do it is an option. While you're at it, look at all the projects you depend on that you would similarly be sad about losing, and set up those donations today.

This is the right attitude. All the "this is sad" comments make me want to ask, "How sad are you? Sad enough to donate?"

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#97

Post by freedomben »

Latty wrote: post #59
freedomben wrote: post #55

> TL;DR: pgBackRest is no longer being maintained. If you fork pgBackRest, please select a new name for your project. > I imagine at some point pgBackRest will be forked, but that will be a new project with new maintainers, and they will need to build trust the same way we did. I completely understand having to back out of maintenance on an OSS project, but why also slam the door closed on someone taking over? There…

To me it reads as being worried that someone malicious could step in and use the project's name to do harm. If you don't have someone within the project with trust built ready-to-go, establishing that trust enough to hand over the project is a big task.

I totally agree, that is a huge risk. But what if someone from the postgres team decided to step up and maintain it? I'm not saying that's likely, but it is possible for a very popular tool like this. With the way the project exited now, that would not at all be an option. Obviously if postgres themselves decided to do it, they wouldn't need the previous credibility so this isn't the best example

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#98

Post by andruby »

fabian2k wrote: post #53
andruby wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been happy with WAL-E and now WAL-G (successor). The streaming PITR nature of these won over pgbackrest when we did the analysis ~9 years ago.

Are you using WAL archiving? As far as I understand, pgbackrest and Barman can also use direct streaming from the DB (same mechanism as replication), I didn't find any mention of this in the WAL-G documentation. With WAL archiving you need to wait for a WAL segment to finish before it's backed up. With streaming backups the deadtime is minimized. At least that's as far as I understand this, I didn't get to try this o…

WAL-G's PITR backups are insurance against data loss through erroneous data manipulations (eg: accidental DELETE/DROP/UPDATE). WAL-G's streaming approach (using pg_receivewal or similar) sends WAL records to backup storage continuously as they're generated, rather than waiting for a full segment to complete.

On top of that, for availability (and minimizing deadtime), we have 2 replicas using streaming replication. If the lead PG crashes, one of the replicas is promoted to lead (and starts accepting writes), and we "only" lose the writes that haven't been sent over the streaming replication.

You can fully eliminate that window of data loss with synchronous replication (vs the default asynchronous replication - which we use). The write slowdown (replica network round trip + 2nd write at replica) isn't worth it for us

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#99

Post by WaitWaitWha »

do not yell at me, but... this is where genAI may be useful.

what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".

Yes, lots of details to work out.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#100

Post by leoc »

dschuessler wrote: post #12
hleszek wrote: post #6

Why not try to find a successor instead of archiving the repo and forbidding the use of the name? I'm sure with a 3.8k stars repo you'll find competent people willing to continue the work.

Because you will attract people who will want to take advantage of the trust these 3.8k stars signal to some people, for example, by means of supply chain attacks.

The Apache Foundation used to help with this sort of governance problem didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.
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