Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 245 posts

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#161

Post by zie »

nijave wrote: post #150
zie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html all of these various 3rd party backup tools use these things. Mostly it's QOL stuff that you get from a 3rd party tool. We use barman, very happily: https://pgbarman.org/

Hopefully barman has some longevity being under EDB assuming some hyperscaler doesn't gobble them up

Barman has been around since 2011, released under the GPL. If it does get ruined by someone, I'll replace it in my stack or fork it for maintenance myself. I'm not very worried though.

EDB has been in private equity(PE) hands since 2019 with out managing to ruin it so far. The ownership in PE hands seems to be pretty stable, so it doesn't look like the typical pump/dump mess you often see from crappy PE money.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#162

Post by bartread »

tracker1 wrote: post #152
pasc1878 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ANd that gets rather looked on here as the authors being deceitful and not really Open Source doing a bait and switch.

I've been working on a software package I'm hoping to release in a few months... I'm really torn on either split FLOSS with commercial extensions, or just going fully private... I was planning on a pretty generous free tier, but hoping to make a bit on the side from commercial customers. It's a bit of a niche as it is, so that's going to be rough in any kind of pricing model, as a large part of that niche is either h…

You could dual license as well, so it’s GPL or AGPL for personal, OSS, or academic use, but requires a paid for commercial license for commercial use.

I suggest GPL or AGPL because their copyleft clauses make them hostile towards platform providers who might otherwise seek to profit from your work without paying.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#163

Post by spockz »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #133
hoistbypetard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you. I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit? It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depen…

And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year. See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

So. If we fix that loophole we both get proper tax revenue and we get to fund OSS better. I say win-win. Although it will be hard to implement in practice.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#164

Post by briffle »

hosh wrote: post #136
j1elo wrote: post #44

Open Source has worked fine here. The author doesn't find financial support for the work, so they just want to change winds and that's a perfectly fine path forward. If this is really much more than a personal project "for fun, on my leisure time", and it became an actually serious product -level project that provides good value in commercial environments for people, there's clearly an opportunity for a for-profit co…

Something I learned about being a part of an ecosystem: if you want it, you need to support it and help it stay alive. That applies to local shops as it does open source projects.

The project has never even had a donation button on its page, only a link with a few sponsors.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#166

Post by vova_hn2 »

freedomben wrote: post #95
rolfvandekrol wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> The door is completely shut for that now.

No, it's not. You can still contact the author and ask them to transfer the name to you.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#167

Post by briffle »

sgarland wrote: post #50
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.

I've used barman on somewhat large-ish DBs (30+ TB), and had no complaints with it. I am a DBRE, if that holds any weight.

We recently moved from Barman to pgBackrest. Our main complaints with barman were that incremental backups utilized hardlinks. Which was great, we could have our 7TB database backed up, and the next day, only 20GB in changes. But, when replicating that data to cloud storage, there is no concept of hardlinks, so now we had to push 14TB to cloud storage. Also, at least last time we looked a while back, file compression was only the WAL files, unless you used the newer barman-cloud-backup tool, which we did not.

Also, pgBackrest lets you do the majority of the backup from a physical standby, which is VERY nice for removing the load off production.

None of these seemed like issues, until we looked at pgBarman, and suddenly realized how nice that would be.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#169

Post by rowanG077 »

Matl wrote: post #165
rowanG077 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?

Because it's a single file you can back up like any other?

I interpreted it as the problem being that the technology may end up unsupported. I mean you can also keep using pgbackrest now. It's not like the code is gone.

Re: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

#170

Post by cornstalks »

rowanG077 wrote: post #155
saadn92 wrote: post #139

[flagged]

Why does sqlite not suffer from the same risk?

SQLite doesn’t depend on donations. They have a consortium, sell licenses (it is open source but some companies like the explicit CYA), sell support contracts, sell an aviation-grade test harness, and sell extensions.

Of course there is always the risk it goes out of business like any other company, but it’s not funded like your typical small open source project and doesn’t even allow open contributions (not necessarily a bad thing IMO but it’s just a totally different type of project).

Post reply on HN