| 1 | -*- indented-text -*- |
| 2 | |
| 3 | FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| 4 | Use chroot only if supported |
| 5 | Allow supplementary groups in rsyncd.conf 2002/04/09 |
| 6 | Handling IPv6 on old machines |
| 7 | Other IPv6 stuff |
| 8 | Add ACL support 2001/12/02 |
| 9 | proxy authentication 2002/01/23 |
| 10 | SOCKS 2002/01/23 |
| 11 | FAT support |
| 12 | --diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15 |
| 13 | Add daemon --no-fork option |
| 14 | Create more granular verbosity 2003/05/15 |
| 15 | |
| 16 | DOCUMENTATION -------------------------------------------------------- |
| 17 | Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site |
| 18 | Perhaps redo manual as SGML |
| 19 | |
| 20 | LOGGING -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 21 | Memory accounting |
| 22 | Improve error messages |
| 23 | Better statistics Rasmus 2002/03/08 |
| 24 | Perhaps flush stdout like syslog |
| 25 | Log child death on signal |
| 26 | verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20 |
| 27 | internationalization |
| 28 | |
| 29 | DEVELOPMENT -------------------------------------------------------- |
| 30 | Handling duplicate names |
| 31 | Use generic zlib 2002/02/25 |
| 32 | TDB 2002/03/12 |
| 33 | Splint 2002/03/12 |
| 34 | |
| 35 | PERFORMANCE ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| 36 | Traverse just one directory at a time |
| 37 | Allow skipping MD4 file_sum 2002/04/08 |
| 38 | Accelerate MD4 |
| 39 | |
| 40 | TESTING -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 41 | Torture test |
| 42 | Cross-test versions 2001/08/22 |
| 43 | Test on kernel source |
| 44 | Test large files |
| 45 | Create mutator program for testing |
| 46 | Create configure option to enable dangerous tests |
| 47 | Create pipe program for testing |
| 48 | Create test makefile target for some tests |
| 49 | |
| 50 | RELATED PROJECTS ----------------------------------------------------- |
| 51 | rsyncsh |
| 52 | http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/ |
| 53 | rsyncable gzip patch |
| 54 | rsyncsplit as alternative to real integration with gzip? |
| 55 | reverse rsync over HTTP Range |
| 56 | |
| 57 | |
| 58 | |
| 59 | FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| 60 | |
| 61 | |
| 62 | Use chroot only if supported |
| 63 | |
| 64 | If the platform doesn't support it, then don't even try. |
| 65 | |
| 66 | If running as non-root, then don't fail, just give a warning. |
| 67 | (There was a thread about this a while ago?) |
| 68 | |
| 69 | http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-August/thread.html |
| 70 | http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-September/thread.html |
| 71 | |
| 72 | -- -- |
| 73 | |
| 74 | |
| 75 | Allow supplementary groups in rsyncd.conf 2002/04/09 |
| 76 | |
| 77 | Perhaps allow supplementary groups to be specified in rsyncd.conf; |
| 78 | then make the first one the primary gid and all the rest be |
| 79 | supplementary gids. |
| 80 | |
| 81 | -- -- |
| 82 | |
| 83 | |
| 84 | Handling IPv6 on old machines |
| 85 | |
| 86 | The KAME IPv6 patch is nice in theory but has proved a bit of a |
| 87 | nightmare in practice. The basic idea of their patch is that rsync |
| 88 | is rewritten to use the new getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() interface, |
| 89 | rather than gethostbyname()/gethostbyaddr() as in rsync 2.4.6. |
| 90 | Systems that don't have the new interface are handled by providing |
| 91 | our own implementation in lib/, which is selectively linked in. |
| 92 | |
| 93 | The problem with this is that it is really hard to get right on |
| 94 | platforms that have a half-working implementation, so redefining |
| 95 | these functions clashes with system headers, and leaving them out |
| 96 | breaks. This affects at least OSF/1, RedHat 5, and Cobalt, which |
| 97 | are moderately improtant. |
| 98 | |
| 99 | Perhaps the simplest solution would be to have two different files |
| 100 | implementing the same interface, and choose either the new or the |
| 101 | old API. This is probably necessary for systems that e.g. have |
| 102 | IPv6, but gethostbyaddr() can't handle it. The Linux manpage claims |
| 103 | this is currently the case. |
| 104 | |
| 105 | In fact, our internal sockets interface (things like |
| 106 | open_socket_out(), etc) is much narrower than the getaddrinfo() |
| 107 | interface, and so probably simpler to get right. In addition, the |
| 108 | old code is known to work well on old machines. |
| 109 | |
| 110 | We could drop the rather large lib/getaddrinfo files. |
| 111 | |
| 112 | -- -- |
| 113 | |
| 114 | |
| 115 | Other IPv6 stuff |
| 116 | |
| 117 | Implement suggestions from http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/ |
| 118 | and ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/RFC/rfc2553.txt |
| 119 | |
| 120 | If a host has multiple addresses, then listen try to connect to all |
| 121 | in order until we get through. (getaddrinfo may return multiple |
| 122 | addresses.) This is kind of implemented already. |
| 123 | |
| 124 | Possibly also when starting as a server we may need to listen on |
| 125 | multiple passive addresses. This might be a bit harder, because we |
| 126 | may need to select on all of them. Hm. |
| 127 | |
| 128 | -- -- |
| 129 | |
| 130 | |
| 131 | Add ACL support 2001/12/02 |
| 132 | |
| 133 | Transfer ACLs. Need to think of a standard representation. |
| 134 | Probably better not to even try to convert between NT and POSIX. |
| 135 | Possibly can share some code with Samba. |
| 136 | NOTE: there is a patch that implements this in the "patches" subdir. |
| 137 | |
| 138 | -- -- |
| 139 | |
| 140 | |
| 141 | proxy authentication 2002/01/23 |
| 142 | |
| 143 | Allow RSYNC_PROXY to be http://user:pass@proxy.foo:3128/, and do |
| 144 | HTTP Basic Proxy-Authentication. |
| 145 | |
| 146 | Multiple schemes are possible, up to and including the insanity that |
| 147 | is NTLM, but Basic probably covers most cases. |
| 148 | |
| 149 | -- -- |
| 150 | |
| 151 | |
| 152 | SOCKS 2002/01/23 |
| 153 | |
| 154 | Add --with-socks, and then perhaps a command-line option to put them |
| 155 | on or off. This might be more reliable than LD_PRELOAD hacks. |
| 156 | |
| 157 | -- -- |
| 158 | |
| 159 | |
| 160 | FAT support |
| 161 | |
| 162 | rsync to a FAT partition on a Unix machine doesn't work very well at |
| 163 | the moment. I think we get errors about invalid filenames and |
| 164 | perhaps also trying to do atomic renames. |
| 165 | |
| 166 | I guess the code to do this is currently #ifdef'd on Windows; |
| 167 | perhaps we ought to intelligently fall back to it on Unix too. |
| 168 | |
| 169 | -- -- |
| 170 | |
| 171 | |
| 172 | --diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15 |
| 173 | |
| 174 | Allow people to specify the diff command. (Might want to use wdiff, |
| 175 | gnudiff, etc.) |
| 176 | |
| 177 | Just diff the temporary file with the destination file, and delete |
| 178 | the tmp file rather than moving it into place. |
| 179 | |
| 180 | Interaction with --partial. |
| 181 | |
| 182 | Security interactions with daemon mode? |
| 183 | |
| 184 | -- -- |
| 185 | |
| 186 | |
| 187 | Add daemon --no-fork option |
| 188 | |
| 189 | Very useful for debugging. Also good when running under a |
| 190 | daemon-monitoring process that tries to restart the service when the |
| 191 | parent exits. |
| 192 | |
| 193 | -- -- |
| 194 | |
| 195 | |
| 196 | Create more granular verbosity 2003/05/15 |
| 197 | |
| 198 | Control output with the --report option. |
| 199 | |
| 200 | The option takes as a single argument (no whitespace) a |
| 201 | comma delimited lists of keywords. |
| 202 | |
| 203 | This would separate debugging from "logging" as well as |
| 204 | fine grained selection of statistical reporting and what |
| 205 | actions are logged. |
| 206 | |
| 207 | http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2003-May/006059.html |
| 208 | |
| 209 | -- -- |
| 210 | |
| 211 | DOCUMENTATION -------------------------------------------------------- |
| 212 | |
| 213 | |
| 214 | Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site |
| 215 | |
| 216 | -- -- |
| 217 | |
| 218 | |
| 219 | Perhaps redo manual as SGML |
| 220 | |
| 221 | The man page is getting rather large, and there is more information |
| 222 | that ought to be added. |
| 223 | |
| 224 | TexInfo source is probably a dying format. |
| 225 | |
| 226 | Linuxdoc looks like the most likely contender. I know DocBook is |
| 227 | favoured by some people, but it's so bloody verbose, even with emacs |
| 228 | support. |
| 229 | |
| 230 | -- -- |
| 231 | |
| 232 | LOGGING -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 233 | |
| 234 | |
| 235 | Memory accounting |
| 236 | |
| 237 | At exit, show how much memory was used for the file list, etc. |
| 238 | |
| 239 | Also we do a wierd exponential-growth allocation in flist.c. I'm |
| 240 | not sure this makes sense with modern mallocs. At any rate it will |
| 241 | make us allocate a huge amount of memory for large file lists. |
| 242 | |
| 243 | -- -- |
| 244 | |
| 245 | |
| 246 | Improve error messages |
| 247 | |
| 248 | If we hang or get SIGINT, then explain where we were up to. Perhaps |
| 249 | have a static buffer that contains the current function name, or |
| 250 | some kind of description of what we were trying to do. This is a |
| 251 | little easier on people than needing to run strace/truss. |
| 252 | |
| 253 | "The dungeon collapses! You are killed." Rather than "unexpected |
| 254 | eof" give a message that is more detailed if possible and also more |
| 255 | helpful. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | If we get an error writing to a socket, then we should perhaps |
| 258 | continue trying to read to see if an error message comes across |
| 259 | explaining why the socket is closed. I'm not sure if this would |
| 260 | work, but it would certainly make our messages more helpful. |
| 261 | |
| 262 | What happens if a directory is missing -x attributes. Do we lose |
| 263 | our load? (Debian #28416) Probably fixed now, but a test case would |
| 264 | be good. |
| 265 | |
| 266 | -- -- |
| 267 | |
| 268 | |
| 269 | Better statistics Rasmus 2002/03/08 |
| 270 | |
| 271 | <Rasmus> |
| 272 | hey, how about an rsync option that just gives you the |
| 273 | summary without the list of files? And perhaps gives |
| 274 | more information like the number of new files, number |
| 275 | of changed, deleted, etc. ? |
| 276 | |
| 277 | <mbp> |
| 278 | nice idea there is --stats but at the moment it's very |
| 279 | tridge-oriented rather than user-friendly it would be |
| 280 | nice to improve it that would also work well with |
| 281 | --dryrun |
| 282 | |
| 283 | -- -- |
| 284 | |
| 285 | |
| 286 | Perhaps flush stdout like syslog |
| 287 | |
| 288 | Perhaps flush stdout after each filename, so that people trying to |
| 289 | monitor progress in a log file can do so more easily. See |
| 290 | http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=48108 |
| 291 | |
| 292 | -- -- |
| 293 | |
| 294 | |
| 295 | Log child death on signal |
| 296 | |
| 297 | If a child of the rsync daemon dies with a signal, we should notice |
| 298 | that when we reap it and log a message. |
| 299 | |
| 300 | -- -- |
| 301 | |
| 302 | |
| 303 | verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20 |
| 304 | |
| 305 | At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred |
| 306 | correctly. |
| 307 | |
| 308 | -- -- |
| 309 | |
| 310 | |
| 311 | internationalization |
| 312 | |
| 313 | Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms |
| 314 | that don't have it. |
| 315 | |
| 316 | Solicit translations. |
| 317 | |
| 318 | Does anyone care? Before we bother modifying the code, we ought to |
| 319 | get the manual translated first, because that's possibly more useful |
| 320 | and at any rate demonstrates desire. |
| 321 | |
| 322 | -- -- |
| 323 | |
| 324 | DEVELOPMENT -------------------------------------------------------- |
| 325 | |
| 326 | Handling duplicate names |
| 327 | |
| 328 | Some folks would like rsync to be deterministic in how it handles |
| 329 | duplicate names that come from mering multiple source directories |
| 330 | into a single destination directory; e.g. the last name wins. We |
| 331 | could do this by switching our sort algorithm to one that will |
| 332 | guarantee that the names won't be reordered. Alternately, we could |
| 333 | assign an ever-increasing number to each item as we insert it into |
| 334 | the list and then make sure that we leave the largest number when |
| 335 | cleaning the file list (see clean_flist()). Another solution would |
| 336 | be to add a hash table, and thus never put any duplicate names into |
| 337 | the file list (and bump the protocol to handle this). |
| 338 | |
| 339 | -- -- |
| 340 | |
| 341 | |
| 342 | Use generic zlib 2002/02/25 |
| 343 | |
| 344 | Perhaps don't use our own zlib. |
| 345 | |
| 346 | Advantages: |
| 347 | |
| 348 | - will automatically be up to date with bugfixes in zlib |
| 349 | |
| 350 | - can leave it out for small rsync on e.g. recovery disks |
| 351 | |
| 352 | - can use a shared library |
| 353 | |
| 354 | - avoids people breaking rsync by trying to do this themselves and |
| 355 | messing up |
| 356 | |
| 357 | Should we ship zlib for systems that don't have it, or require |
| 358 | people to install it separately? |
| 359 | |
| 360 | Apparently this will make us incompatible with versions of rsync |
| 361 | that use the patched version of rsync. Probably the simplest way to |
| 362 | do this is to just disable gzip (with a warning) when talking to old |
| 363 | versions. |
| 364 | |
| 365 | -- -- |
| 366 | |
| 367 | |
| 368 | Splint 2002/03/12 |
| 369 | |
| 370 | Build rsync with SPLINT to try to find security holes. Add |
| 371 | annotations as necessary. Keep track of the number of warnings |
| 372 | found initially, and see how many of them are real bugs, or real |
| 373 | security bugs. Knowing the percentage of likely hits would be |
| 374 | really interesting for other projects. |
| 375 | |
| 376 | -- -- |
| 377 | |
| 378 | PERFORMANCE ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| 379 | |
| 380 | Allow skipping MD4 file_sum 2002/04/08 |
| 381 | |
| 382 | If we're doing a local transfer, or using -W, then perhaps don't |
| 383 | send the file checksum. If we're doing a local transfer, then |
| 384 | calculating MD4 checksums uses 90% of CPU and is unlikely to be |
| 385 | useful. |
| 386 | |
| 387 | We should not allow it to be disabled separately from -W, though |
| 388 | as it is the only thing that lets us know when the rsync algorithm |
| 389 | got out of sync and messed the file up (i.e. if the basis file |
| 390 | changed between checksum generation and reception). |
| 391 | |
| 392 | -- -- |
| 393 | |
| 394 | |
| 395 | Accelerate MD4 |
| 396 | |
| 397 | Perhaps borrow an assembler MD4 from someone? |
| 398 | |
| 399 | Make sure we call MD4 with properly-sized blocks whenever possible |
| 400 | to avoid copying into the residue region? |
| 401 | |
| 402 | -- -- |
| 403 | |
| 404 | TESTING -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 405 | |
| 406 | Torture test |
| 407 | |
| 408 | Something that just keeps running rsync continuously over a data set |
| 409 | likely to generate problems. |
| 410 | |
| 411 | -- -- |
| 412 | |
| 413 | |
| 414 | Cross-test versions 2001/08/22 |
| 415 | |
| 416 | Part of the regression suite should be making sure that we |
| 417 | don't break backwards compatibility: old clients vs new |
| 418 | servers and so on. Ideally we would test both up and down |
| 419 | from the current release to all old versions. |
| 420 | |
| 421 | Run current rsync versions against significant past releases. |
| 422 | |
| 423 | We might need to omit broken old versions, or versions in which |
| 424 | particular functionality is broken |
| 425 | |
| 426 | It might be sufficient to test downloads from well-known public |
| 427 | rsync servers running different versions of rsync. This will give |
| 428 | some testing and also be the most common case for having different |
| 429 | versions and not being able to upgrade. |
| 430 | |
| 431 | The new --protocol option may help in this. |
| 432 | |
| 433 | -- -- |
| 434 | |
| 435 | |
| 436 | Test on kernel source |
| 437 | |
| 438 | Download all versions of kernel; unpack, sync between them. Also |
| 439 | sync between uncompressed tarballs. Compare directories after |
| 440 | transfer. |
| 441 | |
| 442 | Use local mode; ssh; daemon; --whole-file and --no-whole-file. |
| 443 | |
| 444 | Use awk to pull out the 'speedup' number for each transfer. Make |
| 445 | sure it is >= x. |
| 446 | |
| 447 | -- -- |
| 448 | |
| 449 | |
| 450 | Test large files |
| 451 | |
| 452 | Sparse and non-sparse |
| 453 | |
| 454 | -- -- |
| 455 | |
| 456 | |
| 457 | Create mutator program for testing |
| 458 | |
| 459 | Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ... |
| 460 | |
| 461 | -- -- |
| 462 | |
| 463 | |
| 464 | Create configure option to enable dangerous tests |
| 465 | |
| 466 | -- -- |
| 467 | |
| 468 | |
| 469 | Create pipe program for testing |
| 470 | |
| 471 | Create pipe program that makes slow/jerky connections for |
| 472 | testing Versions of read() and write() that corrupt the |
| 473 | stream, or abruptly fail |
| 474 | |
| 475 | -- -- |
| 476 | |
| 477 | |
| 478 | Create test makefile target for some tests |
| 479 | |
| 480 | Separate makefile target to run rough tests -- or perhaps |
| 481 | just run them every time? |
| 482 | |
| 483 | -- -- |
| 484 | |
| 485 | RELATED PROJECTS ----------------------------------------------------- |
| 486 | |
| 487 | rsyncsh |
| 488 | |
| 489 | Write a small emulation of interactive ftp as a Pythonn program |
| 490 | that calls rsync. Commands such as "cd", "ls", "ls *.c" etc map |
| 491 | fairly directly into rsync commands: it just needs to remember the |
| 492 | current host, directory and so on. We can probably even do |
| 493 | completion of remote filenames. |
| 494 | |
| 495 | -- -- |
| 496 | |
| 497 | |
| 498 | http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/ |
| 499 | |
| 500 | |
| 501 | -- -- |
| 502 | |
| 503 | |
| 504 | rsyncable gzip patch |
| 505 | |
| 506 | Exhaustive, tortuous testing |
| 507 | |
| 508 | Cleanups? |
| 509 | |
| 510 | -- -- |
| 511 | |
| 512 | |
| 513 | rsyncsplit as alternative to real integration with gzip? |
| 514 | |
| 515 | -- -- |
| 516 | |
| 517 | |
| 518 | reverse rsync over HTTP Range |
| 519 | |
| 520 | Goswin Brederlow suggested this on Debian; I think tridge and I |
| 521 | talked about it previous in relation to rproxy. |
| 522 | |
| 523 | Addendum: It looks like someone is working on a version of this: |
| 524 | |
| 525 | http://zsync.moria.org.uk/ |
| 526 | |
| 527 | -- -- |
| 528 | |