-*- 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
+
+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
+
+DEVELOPMENT --------------------------------------------------------
+Handling duplicate names
+Use generic zlib 2002/02/25
+TDB 2002/03/12
+Splint 2002/03/12
+
+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
-IMPORTANT ------------------------------------------------------------
-use chroot
+FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+Use chroot only if supported
If the platform doesn't support it, then don't even try.
http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-August/thread.html
http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-September/thread.html
---files-from
+ -- --
- Avoids traversal. Better option than a pile of --include statements
- for people who want to generate the file list using a find(1)
- command or a script.
-File list structure in memory
+Allow supplementary groups in rsyncd.conf 2002/04/09
- Rather than one big array, perhaps have a tree in memory mirroring
- the directory tree.
+ 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.
- This might make sorting much faster! (I'm not sure it's a big CPU
- problem, mind you.)
+ -- --
- It might also reduce memory use in storing repeated directory names
- -- again I'm not sure this is a problem.
-Performance
+Handling IPv6 on old machines
- Traverse just one directory at a time. Tridge says it's possible.
+ 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.
- At the moment rsync reads the whole file list into memory at the
- start, which makes us use a lot of memory and also not pipeline
- network access as much as we could.
+ 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.
-Handling duplicate names
+ 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 need to be careful of duplicate names getting into the file list.
- See clean_flist(). This could happen if multiple arguments include
- the same file. Bad.
+ We could drop the rather large lib/getaddrinfo files.
- I think duplicates are only a problem if they're both flowing
- through the pipeline at the same time. For example we might have
- updated the first occurrence after reading the checksums for the
- second. So possibly we just need to make sure that we don't have
- both in the pipeline at the same time.
+ -- --
- Possibly if we did one directory at a time that would be sufficient.
- Alternatively we could pre-process the arguments to make sure no
- duplicates will ever be inserted. There could be some bad cases
- when we're collapsing symlinks.
+Other IPv6 stuff
+
+ Implement suggestions from http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/
+ and ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/RFC/rfc2553.txt
- We could have a hash table.
+ 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.
- The root of the problem is that we do not want more than one file
- list entry referring to the same file. At first glance there are
- several ways this could happen: symlinks, hardlinks, and repeated
- names on the command line.
+ 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.
- If names are repeated on the command line, they may be present in
- different forms, perhaps by traversing directory paths in different
- ways, traversing paths including symlinks. Also we need to allow
- for expansion of globs by rsync.
+ -- --
- At the moment, clean_flist() requires having the entire file list in
- memory. Duplicate names are detected just by a string comparison.
- We don't need to worry about hard links causing duplicates because
- files are never updated in place. Similarly for symlinks.
+Add ACL support 2001/12/02
- I think even if we're using a different symlink mode we don't need
- to worry.
+ 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.
- Unless we're really clever this will introduce a protocol
- incompatibility, so we need to be able to accept the old format as
- well.
+ -- --
-Memory accounting
+proxy authentication 2002/01/23
- At exit, show how much memory was used for the file list, etc.
+ Allow RSYNC_PROXY to be http://user:pass@proxy.foo:3128/, and do
+ HTTP Basic Proxy-Authentication.
- 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.
+ Multiple schemes are possible, up to and including the insanity that
+ is NTLM, but Basic probably covers most cases.
+ -- --
-Hard-link handling
- At the moment hardlink handling is very expensive, so it's off by
- default. It does not need to be so.
+SOCKS 2002/01/23
- Since most of the solutions are rather intertwined with the file
- list it is probably better to fix that first, although fixing
- hardlinks is possibly simpler.
+ 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.
- We can rule out hardlinked directories since they will probably
- screw us up in all kinds of ways. They simply should not be used.
+ -- --
- At the moment rsync only cares about hardlinks to regular files. I
- guess you could also use them for sockets, devices and other beasts,
- but I have not seen them.
- When trying to reproduce hard links, we only need to worry about
- files that have more than one name (nlinks>1 && !S_ISDIR).
+FAT support
- The basic point of this is to discover alternate names that refer to
- the same file. All operations, including creating the file and
- writing modifications to it need only to be done for the first name.
- For all later names, we just create the link and then leave it
- alone.
+ 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.
- If hard links are to be preserved:
+ 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.
- Before the generator/receiver fork, the list of files is received
- from the sender (recv_file_list), and a table for detecting hard
- links is built.
+ -- --
- The generator looks for hard links within the file list and does
- not send checksums for them, though it does send other metadata.
- The sender sends the device number and inode with file entries, so
- that files are uniquely identified.
+--diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15
- The receiver goes through and creates hard links (do_hard_links)
- after all data has been written, but before directory permissions
- are set.
+ Allow people to specify the diff command. (Might want to use wdiff,
+ gnudiff, etc.)
- At the moment device and inum are sent as 4-byte integers, which
- will probably cause problems on large filesystems. On Linux the
- kernel uses 64-bit ino_t's internally, and people will soon have
- filesystems big enough to use them. We ought to follow NFS4 in
- using 64-bit device and inode identification, perhaps with a
- protocol version bump.
+ Just diff the temporary file with the destination file, and delete
+ the tmp file rather than moving it into place.
- Once we've seen all the names for a particular file, we no longer
- need to think about it and we can deallocate the memory.
+ Interaction with --partial.
- We can also have the case where there are links to a file that are
- not in the tree being transferred. There's nothing we can do about
- that. Because we rename the destination into place after writing,
- any hardlinks to the old file are always going to be orphaned. In
- fact that is almost necessary because otherwise we'd get really
- confused if we were generating checksums for one name of a file and
- modifying another.
+ Security interactions with daemon mode?
- At the moment the code seems to make a whole second copy of the file
- list, which seems unnecessary.
+ -- --
- We should have a test case that exercises hard links. Since it
- might be hard to compare ./tls output where the inodes change we
- might need a little program to check whether several names refer to
- the same file.
-IPv6
+Add daemon --no-fork option
- Implement suggestions from http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/
- and ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/RFC/rfc2553.txt
+ Very useful for debugging. Also good when running under a
+ daemon-monitoring process that tries to restart the service when the
+ parent exits.
- 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.
- Define a syntax for IPv6 literal addresses. Since they include
- colons, they tend to break most naming systems, including ours.
- Based on the HTTP IPv6 syntax, I think we should use
-
- rsync://[::1]/foo/bar
- [::1]::bar
+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 --------------------------------------------------------------
- which should just take a small change to the parser code.
+
+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.
+
+ -- --
-Errors
+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
"The dungeon collapses! You are killed." Rather than "unexpected
eof" give a message that is more detailed if possible and also more
- helpful.
+ 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
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.
-
-
-File attributes
-
- Device major/minor numbers should be at least 32 bits each. See
- http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-November/005357.html
+ our load? (Debian #28416) Probably fixed now, but a test case would
+ be good.
- 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.
+ -- --
-Empty directories
- With the current common --include '*/' --exclude '*' pattern, people
- can end up with many empty directories. We might avoid this by
- lazily creating such directories.
+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. ?
-zlib
-
- Perhaps don't use our own zlib.
-
- Advantages:
-
- - will automatically be up to date with bugfixes in zlib
+ <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
- - 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.
-
-
-logging
+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
- At the connections that just get a list of modules are not logged,
- but they should be.
+ -- --
+
+
+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.
- Keep stderr and stdout properly separated (Debian #23626)
+ -- --
-rsyncd over ssh
+verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20
+
+ At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
+ correctly.
- There are already some patches to do this.
+ -- --
-proxy authentication
- Allow RSYNC_PROXY to be http://user:pass@proxy.foo:3128/, and do
- HTTP Basic Proxy-Authentication.
+internationalization
- Multiple schemes are possible, up to and including the insanity that
- is NTLM, but Basic probably covers most cases.
+ Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms
+ that don't have it.
-SOCKS
+ Solicit translations.
- 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.
+ 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.
-Better statistics:
+ -- --
- <Rasmus> mbp: 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> Rasmus: nice idea
- <mbp> there is --stats
- <mbp> but at the moment it's very tridge-oriented
- <mbp> rather than user-friendly
- <mbp> it would be nice to improve it
- <mbp> that would also work well with --dryrun
+DEVELOPMENT --------------------------------------------------------
-TDB:
+Handling duplicate names
- Rather than storing the file list in memory, store it in a TDB.
+ 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).
- This *might* make memory usage lower while building the file list.
+ -- --
- Hashtable lookup will mean files are not transmitted in order,
- though... hm.
- This would neatly eliminate one of the major post-fork shared data
- structures.
+Use generic zlib 2002/02/25
+ Perhaps don't use our own zlib.
-chmod:
+ Advantages:
+
+ - will automatically be up to date with bugfixes in zlib
- On 12 Mar 2002, Dave Dykstra <dwd@bell-labs.com> wrote:
- > If we would add an option to do that functionality, I would vote for one
- > that was more general which could mask off any set of permission bits and
- > possibly add any set of bits. Perhaps a chmod-like syntax if it could be
- > implemented simply.
+ - can leave it out for small rsync on e.g. recovery disks
- I think that would be good too. For example, people uploading files
- to a web server might like to say
+ - can use a shared library
- rsync -avzP --chmod a+rX ./ sourcefrog.net:/home/www/sourcefrog/
+ - avoids people breaking rsync by trying to do this themselves and
+ messing up
- Ideally the patch would implement as many of the gnu chmod semantics
- as possible. I think the mode parser should be a separate function
- that passes back something like (mask,set) description to the rest of
- the program. For bonus points there would be a test case for the
- parser.
+ Should we ship zlib for systems that don't have it, or require
+ people to install it separately?
- (Debian #23628)
+ 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.
+ -- --
---diff
- Allow people to specify the diff command. (Might want to use wdiff,
- gnudiff, etc.)
+Splint 2002/03/12
- Just diff the temporary file with the destination file, and delete
- the tmp file rather than moving it into place.
+ 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.
- Interaction with --partial.
+ -- --
- Security interactions with daemon mode?
+PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
- (Suggestion from david.e.sewell)
+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.
-PLATFORMS ------------------------------------------------------------
+ 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).
-Win32
+ -- --
- Don't detach, because this messes up --srvany.
- http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00234.html
+Accelerate MD4
- According to "Effective TCP/IP Programming" (??) close() on a socket
- has incorrect behaviour on Windows -- it sends a RST packet to the
- other side, which gives a "connection reset by peer" error. On that
- platform we should probably do shutdown() instead. However, on Unix
- we are correct to call close(), because shutdown() discards
- untransmitted data.
+ Perhaps borrow an assembler MD4 from someone?
-DEVELOPMENT ----------------------------------------------------------
+ Make sure we call MD4 with properly-sized blocks whenever possible
+ to avoid copying into the residue region?
-Splint
+ -- --
- 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.
+TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------
Torture test
Something that just keeps running rsync continuously over a data set
likely to generate problems.
-Cross-testing
+ -- --
- Run current rsync versions against significant past releases.
-
-Memory debugger
-
- jra recommends Valgrind:
- http://devel-home.kde.org/~sewardj/
+Cross-test versions 2001/08/22
-TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------
+ 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.
-Cross-test versions
+ Run current rsync versions against significant past releases.
- 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.
+ 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.
-Test large files
+ The new --protocol option may help in this.
- Sparse and non-sparse
+ -- --
-Mutator program
- Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ...
+Test on kernel source
-configure option to enable dangerous tests
+ Download all versions of kernel; unpack, sync between them. Also
+ sync between uncompressed tarballs. Compare directories after
+ transfer.
-If tests are skipped, say why.
+ Use local mode; ssh; daemon; --whole-file and --no-whole-file.
-Test daemon feature to disallow particular options.
+ Use awk to pull out the 'speedup' number for each transfer. Make
+ sure it is >= x.
+ -- --
-DOCUMENTATION --------------------------------------------------------
-Update README
+Test large files
-Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site
+ Sparse and non-sparse
-Update web site from CVS
+ -- --
-BUILD FARM -----------------------------------------------------------
-Add machines
+Create mutator program for testing
- AMDAHL UTS (Dave Dykstra)
+ Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ...
- Cygwin (on different versions of Win32?)
+ -- --
- HP-UX variants (via HP?)
- SCO
+Create configure option to enable dangerous tests
-NICE -----------------------------------------------------------------
+ -- --
---no-detach and --no-fork options
- Very useful for debugging. Also good when running under a
- daemon-monitoring process that tries to restart the service when the
- parent exits.
+Create pipe program for testing
-hang/timeout friendliness
+ Create pipe program that makes slow/jerky connections for
+ testing Versions of read() and write() that corrupt the
+ stream, or abruptly fail
-verbose output
-
- Indicate whether files are new, updated, or deleted
+ -- --
- At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
- correctly.
-internationalization
+Create test makefile target for some tests
- Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms
- that don't have it.
+ Separate makefile target to run rough tests -- or perhaps
+ just run them every time?
- Solicit translations.
+ -- --
- Does anyone care?
+RELATED PROJECTS -----------------------------------------------------
-rsyncsh
+rsyncsh
Write a small emulation of interactive ftp as a Pythonn program
that calls rsync. Commands such as "cd", "ls", "ls *.c" etc map
fairly directly into rsync commands: it just needs to remember the
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