how best to share existing tarsnap setup with Tarsnap GUI?

[dch]

It's not clear how best to re-use an existing tarsnap configuration yet.

This should cover:

1. cache dir permissions chown $USER:wheel /usr/local/tarsnap-cache
2. sharing or re-using machine key(s), perhaps regenerated with different permissions
3. sharing the tarsnap.conf -- atm I see no way of referring to this in the GUI so it's not clear if /usr/local/etc/tarsnap.conf and/or ~/.tarsnaprc are being applied. I assume they will be used as usual...

[shinnok]

1. What I do now for an existing cache spec is check if it's a dir and if it is writable for the current EUID. If not the Wizard will refuse it. In the Settings page I set the LineEdit to red color to signal an error. What else could I do is a bit unclear, maybe improve some specific error cases or phrases?

2. This is again an unclear problem. Currently one can only set an existing key either via the Wizard's file browse dialog, which implies read access to it. The other case being in the Settings pane.

3. The app doesn't know about and shouldn't care about the tarsnap rcs. The precedence order is:

   • Any value passed as an argument overrides (including the ones from the GUI)
   • Any value in ~/.tarsnaprc overrides
   • Any value in /etc/tarsnap.conf

   Doing anything in that regards would be wrongdoing to the advanced users and existing system configurations. That being said, the application is expected to work just fine with default installations and is explicitly invoking tarsnap with all args required for any specific operation(thus it doesn't rely on any existing config to be present). If any specific problems will come up we'll worry about it then, but so far I'm not aware of any.
   The only control we would get over that matter is when it comes the time to bundle both the GUI and the CLI utils in the same redistributable package.

[dch]

thanks for the clarifications, how about I update README or some other file with more info?

[shinnok]

Sure, do a PR. README is a good choice for the time being.

[shinnok]

@dch Do you still plan to do something in regards to this? Alternatively it could be a FAQ entry in this wiki page https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap.

I'm not sure if you can make PR for wiki pages on Github.

[shinnok]

Added a clarification as FAQ entry to https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui/wiki/Tarsnap. Closed.

[Folcon]

@shinnok I'm wondering if this should be highlighted to the user on startup of a new application, I spent a bunch of time trying to work out why it couldn't see my existing files.

[gperciva]

Yes, there's more that we can do here. I'll revisit this in the next few weeks.

[Folcon]

Would be happy to go over areas which I think of as confusing in the UI if you want?

[gperciva]

Hi @Folcon! Thanks for the offer, but not yet. Currently I'm focusing on tests and adding doxygen comments so that I know how the code is organized. I'm going to look at the UI once there's a stable foundation so that I don't accidentally break anything if and when I change something.

[Folcon]

@gperciva, no problem. Feel free to msg me if you want some feedback :)...