-*- indented-text -*-
-URGENT ---------------------------------------------------------------
+FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
+Use chroot only if supported
+Allow supplementary groups in rsyncd.conf 2002/04/09
+Handling IPv6 on old machines
+Other IPv6 stuff
+Add ACL support 2001/12/02
+proxy authentication 2002/01/23
+SOCKS 2002/01/23
+FAT support
+--diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15
+Add daemon --no-fork option
+Create more granular verbosity 2003/05/15
+DOCUMENTATION --------------------------------------------------------
+Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site
+Perhaps redo manual as SGML
-IMPORTANT ------------------------------------------------------------
+LOGGING --------------------------------------------------------------
+Memory accounting
+Improve error messages
+Better statistics Rasmus 2002/03/08
+Perhaps flush stdout like syslog
+Log child death on signal
+verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20
+internationalization
-Cross-test versions
+DEVELOPMENT --------------------------------------------------------
+Handling duplicate names
+Use generic zlib 2002/02/25
+TDB 2002/03/12
+Splint 2002/03/12
- Part of the regression suite should be making sure that we don't
- break backwards compatibility: old clients vs new servers and so
- on. Ideally we would test the cross product of versions.
+PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
+Traverse just one directory at a time
+Allow skipping MD4 file_sum 2002/04/08
+Accelerate MD4
+
+TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------
+Torture test
+Cross-test versions 2001/08/22
+Test on kernel source
+Test large files
+Create mutator program for testing
+Create configure option to enable dangerous tests
+Create pipe program for testing
+Create test makefile target for some tests
+
+RELATED PROJECTS -----------------------------------------------------
+rsyncsh
+http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/
+rsyncable gzip patch
+rsyncsplit as alternative to real integration with gzip?
+reverse rsync over HTTP Range
+
+
+
+FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+Use chroot only if supported
+
+ If the platform doesn't support it, then don't even try.
+
+ If running as non-root, then don't fail, just give a warning.
+ (There was a thread about this a while ago?)
+
+ http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-August/thread.html
+ http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-September/thread.html
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Allow supplementary groups in rsyncd.conf 2002/04/09
+
+ Perhaps allow supplementary groups to be specified in rsyncd.conf;
+ then make the first one the primary gid and all the rest be
+ supplementary gids.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Handling IPv6 on old machines
+
+ The KAME IPv6 patch is nice in theory but has proved a bit of a
+ nightmare in practice. The basic idea of their patch is that rsync
+ is rewritten to use the new getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() interface,
+ rather than gethostbyname()/gethostbyaddr() as in rsync 2.4.6.
+ Systems that don't have the new interface are handled by providing
+ our own implementation in lib/, which is selectively linked in.
+
+ The problem with this is that it is really hard to get right on
+ platforms that have a half-working implementation, so redefining
+ these functions clashes with system headers, and leaving them out
+ breaks. This affects at least OSF/1, RedHat 5, and Cobalt, which
+ are moderately improtant.
+
+ Perhaps the simplest solution would be to have two different files
+ implementing the same interface, and choose either the new or the
+ old API. This is probably necessary for systems that e.g. have
+ IPv6, but gethostbyaddr() can't handle it. The Linux manpage claims
+ this is currently the case.
+
+ In fact, our internal sockets interface (things like
+ open_socket_out(), etc) is much narrower than the getaddrinfo()
+ interface, and so probably simpler to get right. In addition, the
+ old code is known to work well on old machines.
+
+ We could drop the rather large lib/getaddrinfo files.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Other IPv6 stuff
+
+ Implement suggestions from http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/
+ and ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/RFC/rfc2553.txt
+
+ If a host has multiple addresses, then listen try to connect to all
+ in order until we get through. (getaddrinfo may return multiple
+ addresses.) This is kind of implemented already.
+
+ Possibly also when starting as a server we may need to listen on
+ multiple passive addresses. This might be a bit harder, because we
+ may need to select on all of them. Hm.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Add ACL support 2001/12/02
+
+ Transfer ACLs. Need to think of a standard representation.
+ Probably better not to even try to convert between NT and POSIX.
+ Possibly can share some code with Samba.
+ NOTE: there is a patch that implements this in the "patches" subdir.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+proxy authentication 2002/01/23
+
+ Allow RSYNC_PROXY to be http://user:pass@proxy.foo:3128/, and do
+ HTTP Basic Proxy-Authentication.
+
+ Multiple schemes are possible, up to and including the insanity that
+ is NTLM, but Basic probably covers most cases.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+SOCKS 2002/01/23
+
+ Add --with-socks, and then perhaps a command-line option to put them
+ on or off. This might be more reliable than LD_PRELOAD hacks.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+FAT support
+
+ rsync to a FAT partition on a Unix machine doesn't work very well at
+ the moment. I think we get errors about invalid filenames and
+ perhaps also trying to do atomic renames.
+
+ I guess the code to do this is currently #ifdef'd on Windows;
+ perhaps we ought to intelligently fall back to it on Unix too.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+--diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15
+
+ Allow people to specify the diff command. (Might want to use wdiff,
+ gnudiff, etc.)
+
+ Just diff the temporary file with the destination file, and delete
+ the tmp file rather than moving it into place.
+
+ Interaction with --partial.
+
+ Security interactions with daemon mode?
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Add daemon --no-fork option
+
+ Very useful for debugging. Also good when running under a
+ daemon-monitoring process that tries to restart the service when the
+ parent exits.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Create more granular verbosity 2003/05/15
+
+ Control output with the --report option.
+
+ The option takes as a single argument (no whitespace) a
+ comma delimited lists of keywords.
+
+ This would separate debugging from "logging" as well as
+ fine grained selection of statistical reporting and what
+ actions are logged.
+
+ http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2003-May/006059.html
+
+ -- --
+
+DOCUMENTATION --------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Perhaps redo manual as SGML
+
+ The man page is getting rather large, and there is more information
+ that ought to be added.
+
+ TexInfo source is probably a dying format.
+
+ Linuxdoc looks like the most likely contender. I know DocBook is
+ favoured by some people, but it's so bloody verbose, even with emacs
+ support.
+
+ -- --
+
+LOGGING --------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+Memory accounting
+
+ At exit, show how much memory was used for the file list, etc.
+
+ Also we do a wierd exponential-growth allocation in flist.c. I'm
+ not sure this makes sense with modern mallocs. At any rate it will
+ make us allocate a huge amount of memory for large file lists.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Improve error messages
+
+ If we hang or get SIGINT, then explain where we were up to. Perhaps
+ have a static buffer that contains the current function name, or
+ some kind of description of what we were trying to do. This is a
+ little easier on people than needing to run strace/truss.
+
+ "The dungeon collapses! You are killed." Rather than "unexpected
+ eof" give a message that is more detailed if possible and also more
+ helpful.
+
+ If we get an error writing to a socket, then we should perhaps
+ continue trying to read to see if an error message comes across
+ explaining why the socket is closed. I'm not sure if this would
+ work, but it would certainly make our messages more helpful.
+
+ What happens if a directory is missing -x attributes. Do we lose
+ our load? (Debian #28416) Probably fixed now, but a test case would
+ be good.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Better statistics Rasmus 2002/03/08
+
+ <Rasmus>
+ hey, how about an rsync option that just gives you the
+ summary without the list of files? And perhaps gives
+ more information like the number of new files, number
+ of changed, deleted, etc. ?
+
+ <mbp>
+ nice idea there is --stats but at the moment it's very
+ tridge-oriented rather than user-friendly it would be
+ nice to improve it that would also work well with
+ --dryrun
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Perhaps flush stdout like syslog
+
+ Perhaps flush stdout after each filename, so that people trying to
+ monitor progress in a log file can do so more easily. See
+ http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=48108
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Log child death on signal
+
+ If a child of the rsync daemon dies with a signal, we should notice
+ that when we reap it and log a message.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20
+
+ At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
+ correctly.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+internationalization
+
+ Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms
+ that don't have it.
+
+ Solicit translations.
+
+ Does anyone care? Before we bother modifying the code, we ought to
+ get the manual translated first, because that's possibly more useful
+ and at any rate demonstrates desire.
+
+ -- --
+
+DEVELOPMENT --------------------------------------------------------
+
+Handling duplicate names
+
+ Some folks would like rsync to be deterministic in how it handles
+ duplicate names that come from mering multiple source directories
+ into a single destination directory; e.g. the last name wins. We
+ could do this by switching our sort algorithm to one that will
+ guarantee that the names won't be reordered. Alternately, we could
+ assign an ever-increasing number to each item as we insert it into
+ the list and then make sure that we leave the largest number when
+ cleaning the file list (see clean_flist()). Another solution would
+ be to add a hash table, and thus never put any duplicate names into
+ the file list (and bump the protocol to handle this).
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Use generic zlib 2002/02/25
+
+ Perhaps don't use our own zlib.
+
+ Advantages:
+
+ - will automatically be up to date with bugfixes in zlib
+
+ - can leave it out for small rsync on e.g. recovery disks
+
+ - can use a shared library
+
+ - avoids people breaking rsync by trying to do this themselves and
+ messing up
+
+ Should we ship zlib for systems that don't have it, or require
+ people to install it separately?
+
+ Apparently this will make us incompatible with versions of rsync
+ that use the patched version of rsync. Probably the simplest way to
+ do this is to just disable gzip (with a warning) when talking to old
+ versions.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Splint 2002/03/12
+
+ Build rsync with SPLINT to try to find security holes. Add
+ annotations as necessary. Keep track of the number of warnings
+ found initially, and see how many of them are real bugs, or real
+ security bugs. Knowing the percentage of likely hits would be
+ really interesting for other projects.
+
+ -- --
+
+PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
+
+Allow skipping MD4 file_sum 2002/04/08
+
+ If we're doing a local transfer, or using -W, then perhaps don't
+ send the file checksum. If we're doing a local transfer, then
+ calculating MD4 checksums uses 90% of CPU and is unlikely to be
+ useful.
+
+ We should not allow it to be disabled separately from -W, though
+ as it is the only thing that lets us know when the rsync algorithm
+ got out of sync and messed the file up (i.e. if the basis file
+ changed between checksum generation and reception).
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Accelerate MD4
+
+ Perhaps borrow an assembler MD4 from someone?
+
+ Make sure we call MD4 with properly-sized blocks whenever possible
+ to avoid copying into the residue region?
+
+ -- --
+
+TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Torture test
+
+ Something that just keeps running rsync continuously over a data set
+ likely to generate problems.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Cross-test versions 2001/08/22
+
+ Part of the regression suite should be making sure that we
+ don't break backwards compatibility: old clients vs new
+ servers and so on. Ideally we would test both up and down
+ from the current release to all old versions.
+
+ Run current rsync versions against significant past releases.
+
+ We might need to omit broken old versions, or versions in which
+ particular functionality is broken
It might be sufficient to test downloads from well-known public
rsync servers running different versions of rsync. This will give
some testing and also be the most common case for having different
versions and not being able to upgrade.
+ The new --protocol option may help in this.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Test on kernel source
+
+ Download all versions of kernel; unpack, sync between them. Also
+ sync between uncompressed tarballs. Compare directories after
+ transfer.
+
+ Use local mode; ssh; daemon; --whole-file and --no-whole-file.
+
+ Use awk to pull out the 'speedup' number for each transfer. Make
+ sure it is >= x.
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Test large files
+
+ Sparse and non-sparse
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Create mutator program for testing
+
+ Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ...
+
+ -- --
+
+
+Create configure option to enable dangerous tests
-NICE -----------------------------------------------------------------
+ -- --
-Merge IPv6 support ***
-A patch is available at
+Create pipe program for testing
- ftp://ftp.kame.net/pub/kame/misc/rsync-244-v6-20000802.diff.gz
+ Create pipe program that makes slow/jerky connections for
+ testing Versions of read() and write() that corrupt the
+ stream, or abruptly fail
-but tridge reckons it needs to be cleaned up before it can be
-accepted.
+ -- --
-This is now on the track-kameipv6 branch and can be moved across any
-time. The KAME people say that it should work on machines without
-IPv6 stacks.
-rsyncsh
+Create test makefile target for some tests
+
+ Separate makefile target to run rough tests -- or perhaps
+ just run them every time?
+
+ -- --
+
+RELATED PROJECTS -----------------------------------------------------
+
+rsyncsh
Write a small emulation of interactive ftp as a Pythonn program
that calls rsync. Commands such as "cd", "ls", "ls *.c" etc map
current host, directory and so on. We can probably even do
completion of remote filenames.
+ -- --
+
+
+http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/
+
+
+ -- --
+
+
+rsyncable gzip patch
+
+ Exhaustive, tortuous testing
+
+ Cleanups?
+
+ -- --
+
+
+rsyncsplit as alternative to real integration with gzip?
+
+ -- --
+
+
+reverse rsync over HTTP Range
+
+ Goswin Brederlow suggested this on Debian; I think tridge and I
+ talked about it previous in relation to rproxy.
+
+ Addendum: It looks like someone is working on a version of this:
+
+ http://zsync.moria.org.uk/
+
+ -- --
+
Matt McCutchen's Web Site / rsync / rsync.git / blobdiff