Today is Monday the 3rd of December, known in Oxford (and by the Oxford::Calendar module) as Monday 9th week of Michaelmas, which means it's the first day after the end of term, which means NO STUDENTS!
Furthermore, the advisory system has switched over to RT, and it Just Works, so we're getting less stupid questions. It means that we can concentrate on hacking, and so I've been taking the opportunity to get Bacman nearly finished.
Bacman is a Really Cool Thing - it's a backup management service, a little like Amanda, but it's much more flexible. And, of course, it's all written in Perl. It uses the DBI to talk to a Postgres backend, IPC::Run to handle calls to ssh, rsh or whatever else fetches backup data, and Parse::RecDescent in a really cool way to process schedule exceptions. That's to say, you can say bacman request --weekly --host=foo --fs=/bar/baz --restrict="not on Sundays or bank holidays" and it'll do the Right Thing.
I've also been playing with Zope, which is considerably easier to set up and get using than the last time I looked at it. I'm not sure if it does what we want - it probably can, but I need to invest a lot of effort into grokking the possibility of categorising data, and/or combining with AxKit to handle XML documents. Probably not going to happen.
Another task for the day is looking at maillist software - or, in other words, justifying the move towards Mailman. The problem with Mailman is that there isn't really a mail-based administration front-end. Could be a job for Mail::Audit...
