[CentOS] BackupPC is not easy to setup

I finally got BackupPC working under Centos-7.1
after several hours of pain.
I had been running it for several years under CentOS-6,
and probably CentOS-5, but there seem to me
to have been several new issues that arise with CentOS-7.

In my experience, the official documentation on this,
<http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html>,
is more or less useless unless you have a very long time to spend.
It suffers from the usual Linux disease of having
inordinately long explanations of everything
with no examples of the actual commands a real person has to give.

The explanation in <https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupPC>
(which I only found later) is much better, 
though it starts with the warning
"This page is no longer maintained, having been abandoned on 2009-09-17".

I thought I'd write a 1-page note to myself of the steps I took,
in preparation for CentOS-8...
I have a couple of questions that this raises.

1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root?
Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root?

2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra,
but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC?
Is there a CLI approach?
If so, where is the list of transfer requests kept?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin