dbackup possibility

[dhs@firefly.com (David H. Silber)]

Folks,

I am in the middle of writing ``dbackup'' -- a backup mechanism which will
take advantage of the debian packaging mechanism to reduce the amount of
storage required to make a complete backup of your system.

I wanted to confirm that the files under /var/catman are generated from
source files provided with the various packages and thus don't need to be
backed up.  It occurs to me that that might not always be the case, and
in any event, we will need some method of identifying files which do not
need to be backed up because they are generated on the fly (font files
come to mind).

What I am considering is a script file which would be optional for each
package.  I suggest that this file be treated just like the
{pre,post}{inst,rm} files.  It would be called ``backup'' and would be
maintained as part of the package under the name ``debian.backup''.
It would be installed into /var/lib/dpkg/info along with the other
package information as <package>.backup.

The backup script would provide on its standard output a list of files
that should not be backed up, even though they are not listed in the
<package>.list file.

What do you people think of this?


Thanks,
David

-- 
  David H. Silber     dhs@firefly.com     Project: Debian GNU/Linux (dbackup)
  <http://www.access.digex.net/~dhs/>     Wanted:  Spare time.

			     Programmer for hire.