[ANN] libchop 0.5.1, tools & library for data backup and distributed storage

[Ludovic Courtès]

I am pleased to announce the release of libchop 0.5.1.  Libchop is a set
of tools, including an encrypted backup application, as well as a C and
Scheme library aimed as a building block for distributed data storage
and data backup applications.

The homepage is located at:
  http://www.nongnu.org/libchop/

Here are the compressed sources:
  http://dl.sv.nongnu.org/releases/libchop/libchop-0.5.1.tar.gz   (1.2MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  http://dl.sv.nongnu.org/releases/libchop/libchop-0.5.1.tar.gz.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

463b2fe350ae6d157e3e398d75a31986  libchop-0.5.1.tar.gz
673eb06573486f9901c232d07a03aa6ccc02b409  libchop-0.5.1.tar.gz

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.68
  Automake 1.11.1
  Libtool 2.4
  Gnulib v0.0-6392-g4f11d6b


Libchop’s main application is ‘chop-backup’, an encrypted backup program
with support for versioning, selective sharing, and adaptive
compression.  It is the main new feature of this release.

The library itself, which chop-backup builds upon, implements storage
techniques such as content-based addressing, content hash keys, Merkle
trees, similarity detection, and lossless compression.  It makes it easy
to combine them in different ways.  The ‘chop-archiver’ and
‘chop-block-server’ tools, illustrated in the manual, provide direct
access to these facilities from the command line.

This release is primarily a bug-fix release, with a few new features.
Excerpt from the ‘NEWS’ file:

  Changes in 0.5.1 (since 0.5)

  * New features
  ** chop-backup
  *** New `--probe' option

  See the manual for details.

  *** Default to the tuple of a recent backup that is available

  The `--show', `--list', and other commands now default to the tuple of
  the most recent backup available in the given store.  Previously, when
  no tuple was given, they would default to the most recent backup,
  regardless of whether it's available in the given store.

  *** Several tuples are kept in the recent-backup cache for each directory

  Previously, only the tuple pointing to the latest snapshot of each
  directory would be kept.

  ** chop-show-similarities

  *** New --blocks option
  *** Choose the fingerprint mask intelligently by default

  `chop-show-similarities' attempts to choose the right granularity when
  comparing two files.

  * Packaging improvements, bug fixes

  ** chop-backup
  *** The `--list' option displays dates smartly, like GNU ls does
  *** Fix possible file descriptor exhaustion with `--backup'
  ** library
  *** Fix possible off-by-N in the deserializer of the CHK/hash block indexers
  ** Various
  *** Make sure the `utils/backup' test uses the current source code
  *** Document stream choppers, `chop-show-anchors', and 
`chop-show-similarities'


Feedback welcome!

Thanks,
Ludo’.

pgpoeh2hbELw2.pgp
Description: PGP signature