FromSourceOnDeb

From RdiffBackupWiki

bs aren't quite right

My ISP offers rdiff-backup service. My user files are on his RAID box when my disk crashes. We manage it with backupninja from Riseup.net. Nice.

But he's using rdiff-backup-1.0.3. I'm on Debian 3.1 (Sarge) and some .deb versions are too old. I built Python-2.3.5 from source because Sarge's Python doesn't run Mailman reliably. Sarge has rdiff-backup-0.13.4 (oops) and librsync-0.9.7 (good enough). His system wants /usr/bin/rdiff-backup to say 1.0.3. It has to be that location and that version.

rdiff-backup from source on Debian 3.1

So I build rdiff-backup-1.0.3 locally, and use the new Python. I also installed librsync-0.9.7 from source, in the default /usr/local. Probably not needed, but that's what rdiff-backup was written against.

My Python-2.3.5 is in /usr/local/{bin,lib,man} and /usr/local/bin is ahead of /usr/bin in PATH. rdiff-backup will look for modules in /usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/. I did something like this:

  apt-get install librsync-dev
  cd /usr/src
  wget [http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup-1.0.3.tar.gz]
  tar xzf rdiff-backup-1.0.3.tar.gz
  cd rdiff-backup-1.0.3
  python setup.py --librsync-dir=/usr/local build
  python setup.py install

This results in /usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup installed correctly, and knowing where librsync is. It also installed /usr/local/bin/rdiff-backup and the manpage.

rdiff-backup from source on Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty) to 8.10 (intrepid)

Substitute the version you want in the first line:

  ver=1.2.2
  sudo apt-get install librsync-dev python-dev
  cd /usr/src
  sudo wget "http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup-$ver.tar.gz"
  sudo tar xzf rdiff-backup-$ver.tar.gz
  cd rdiff-backup-$ver
  sudo python setup.py --librsync-dir=/usr/local build
  sudo python setup.py install
  ver=