nbd 2.9.10

I Just released NBD 2.9.10. It had been upcoming for a while already, with a few interesting patches being applied. In addition, some bugfixes were applied to subversion, and some more interesting things had happened. Really, a release was getting overdue. Sometimes life just intervenes.

Anyway, apart from the upstream release, I of course also did a Debian update of these packages, which also contains some changes that had been pending for a while. Combined, the changelog mentions five different bugs of which none are l10n bugs, which is a record (there had been 5-bug uploads before, but those did include l10n bugs). On top of that, I closed some other outstanding bugs which really had been closed a while back, but either I forgot to close the bug, or I forgot that there even was a bug in the first place.

I should stop slacking so much.

While preparing this upload, it occurred to me that nbd has come a long way since I got involved with it back in 2001. The original nbd-server that Pavel Machek had written did work well, but it was a bit of a hack; it did not fork() upon startup or anything similar, so starting it was a pain. It could only serve one device at a time. It was not documented. It had no concept of a configuration file. The code, frankly, was also bit of a mess; it was written on a hack night, and not much design had gone into it.

I guess it was no surprise, then, that no single distribution had a package for nbd at the time. I only packaged it because I actually had some use for nbd; at the time, I'd just bought quickstep, my first functional m68k machine, and had installed Debian on its 250MB hard disk. However, running a buildd on that machine proved problematic, to say the least; with so little disk space, you could hardly boot Debian, and due to speed and clock skew issues, NFS was not an option. So I went with NBD, which worked great. After a while, quickstep got a bigger hard disk (it has an 18G disk today), so diskspace was less of an issue at that point; but, well, I'd been maintaining it already, and that was fun, so I didn't think of giving up.

When Pavel lost interest in nbd back in 2003, he gave maintenance of the kernel bits to Paul Clements, and maintenance of the userspace bits to me. I promptly went ahead with what I thought should have been done already, but felt reluctant to do at the time to suggest that: refactoring the code, adding features, etc. Today, nbd-server does support all of the above things of which I mentioned it was lacking; and, probably as a result of that, apart from Debian, there are now packages of nbd in, at least, SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, uClibc, and FreeBSD (the latter obviously only containing the server). Well—the fact that LTSP uses it might have something to do with it, too

That's not to say there's nothing left to be done, but I'm quite happy about how far we've come. Really.