[Box Backup] Planning to release 1.0

Jan Haastrecht jan.haastrecht at gmail.com
Tue Dec 30 20:52:49 GMT 2014


Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to declare that the next release will be numbered 1.0. Now that 
> I'm using Box Backup myself on my laptop, I'm more confident about its 
> stability, and my ability to support it. And it would hopefully help to boost 
> adoption if we declare that stability to the world.
>
> Would anyone object to this?
I object to this. AFAICT, you still have a lot of bugs open. I don't see the 
point of releasing a 1.0 with known correctness bugs. Next to that, you have 
little infrastructure to even test a wide variety of use cases (even though 
open-source stress tests for backup systems exist now). As such, calling it 1.0 
would be inappropriate.

I am not discounting that you put in a lot of effort, but effort doesn't always 
translate into a high quality program. As a data point, I have never been able 
to do a proper backup using MIPS hardware on a resource constrained platform (it 
was not OOM), and since I don't believe that your code triggers compiler bugs 
(it's not that complex), I am going with the hypothesis that you probably rely 
on some UB in various places, which in turn reduces my trust in your software (I 
don't currently use it, because of this lack of quality, and I was waiting for 
you to demonstrate quality (that's what other authors of backup software do)). 
As long as you cannot demonstrate that your code survives torture tests, there 
is no reason to assume that it works.

FYI, I am _not_ interested in any discussion about this. I don't believe that 
you should release software which has flaws in them, similarly, I don't think 
you should tell anyone about software which doesn't do something useful 
correctly in 100% of the cases, as opposed to 99.9% of the cases (especially 
when it comes to backup software). You might have a different view on this, and 
you are free to hold that view, but please don't waste time on sharing it. 
Either take my advice into account (and you will likely get more users) or don't.

Jan



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