X-Git-Url: https://mattmccutchen.net/rsync/rsync.git/blobdiff_plain/e53fe9a278881d1d96e73372bb13b57ebcbed73d..bd685982389b78a158921b7839bdeca501338d19:/TODO diff --git a/TODO b/TODO index f28af206..9baf4631 100644 --- a/TODO +++ b/TODO @@ -1,22 +1,65 @@ -*- 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 - 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. -use chroot + +FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------ + + +Use chroot only if supported If the platform doesn't support it, then don't even try. @@ -26,175 +69,181 @@ use chroot 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. -Errors + 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 @@ -203,27 +252,96 @@ Errors "The dungeon collapses! You are killed." Rather than "unexpected eof" give a message that is more detailed if possible and also more - helpful. + helpful. -File attributes + 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. - Device major/minor numbers should be at least 32 bits each. See - http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-November/005357.html + 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. - 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. + -- -- + + +Better statistics Rasmus 2002/03/08 + + + 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. ? + + + 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 -------------------------------------------------------- -Empty directories +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). - With the current common --include '*/' --exclude '*' pattern, people - can end up with many empty directories. We might avoid this by - lazily creating such directories. + -- -- -zlib +Use generic zlib 2002/02/25 - Perhaps don't use our own zlib. + Perhaps don't use our own zlib. Advantages: @@ -244,139 +362,167 @@ zlib do this is to just disable gzip (with a warning) when talking to old versions. + -- -- -logging - 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 +Splint 2002/03/12 - At the connections that just get a list of modules are not logged, - but they should be. + 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. -rsyncd over ssh + -- -- - There are already some patches to do this. +PERFORMANCE ---------------------------------------------------------- -proxy authentication +Allow skipping MD4 file_sum 2002/04/08 - Allow RSYNC_PROXY to be http://user:pass@proxy.foo:3128/, and do - HTTP Basic Proxy-Authentication. + 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. - Multiple schemes are possible, up to and including the insanity that - is NTLM, but Basic probably covers most cases. + 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). -SOCKS + -- -- - 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. -Better statistics: +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? - 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. ? - Rasmus: 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 + -- -- -TDB: +TESTING -------------------------------------------------------------- + +Torture test + + Something that just keeps running rsync continuously over a data set + likely to generate problems. - Rather than storing the file list in memory, store it in a TDB. + -- -- - This *might* make memory usage lower while building the file list. - Hashtable lookup will mean files are not transmitted in order, - though... hm. +Cross-test versions 2001/08/22 - This would neatly eliminate one of the major post-fork shared data - structures. + 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. -PLATFORMS ------------------------------------------------------------ + We might need to omit broken old versions, or versions in which + particular functionality is broken -Win32 + 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. - Don't detach, because this messes up --srvany. + The new --protocol option may help in this. - http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00234.html + -- -- - 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. -DEVELOPMENT ---------------------------------------------------------- +Test on kernel source -Splint + Download all versions of kernel; unpack, sync between them. Also + sync between uncompressed tarballs. Compare directories after + transfer. - 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. + Use local mode; ssh; daemon; --whole-file and --no-whole-file. -Torture test + Use awk to pull out the 'speedup' number for each transfer. Make + sure it is >= x. - 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. +Test large files -DOCUMENTATION -------------------------------------------------------- + Sparse and non-sparse -Update README + -- -- -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/ + + -- -- +