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cd59be1d5ebfd0dfd07db5d87caacd5164776675
rsync/TODO
Wayne Davison 9c15534511 Got rid of the "refuse options" section.
2004-02-21 21:37:14 +00:00

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-*- indented-text -*-
BUGS ---------------------------------------------------------------
Fix progress indicator to not corrupt log
lchmod question
Do not rely on having a group called "nobody"
Incorrect timestamps (Debian #100295)
Win32
FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
server-imposed bandwidth limits
rsyncd over ssh
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
Lazy directory creation
proxy authentication 2002/01/23
SOCKS 2002/01/23
FAT support
Allow forcing arbitrary permissions 2002/03/12
--diff david.e.sewell 2002/03/15
Add daemon --no-detach and --no-fork options
Create more granular verbosity jw 2003/05/15
DOCUMENTATION --------------------------------------------------------
Update README
Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site
Update web site from CVS
Perhaps redo manual as SGML
LOGGING --------------------------------------------------------------
Make dry run list all updates 2002/04/03
Memory accounting
Improve error messages
Better statistics: Rasmus 2002/03/08
Perhaps flush stdout like syslog
Log deamon sessions that just list modules
Log child death on signal
Keep stderr and stdout properly separated (Debian #23626)
Log errors with function that reports process of origin
verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20
Add reason for transfer to file logging
debugging of daemon 2002/04/08
internationalization
DEVELOPMENT --------------------------------------------------------
Handling duplicate names
Use generic zlib 2002/02/25
TDB: 2002/03/12
Splint 2002/03/12
Memory debugger
Create release script
Add machines to build farm
PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
File list structure in memory
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
If tests are skipped, say why.
Test daemon feature to disallow particular options.
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
BUGS ---------------------------------------------------------------
Fix progress indicator to not corrupt log
Progress indicator can produce corrupt output when transferring directories:
main/binary-arm/
main/binary-arm/admin/
main/binary-arm/base/
main/binary-arm/comm/8.56kB/s 0:00:52
main/binary-arm/devel/
main/binary-arm/doc/
main/binary-arm/editors/
main/binary-arm/electronics/s 0:00:53
main/binary-arm/games/
main/binary-arm/graphics/
main/binary-arm/hamradio/
main/binary-arm/interpreters/
main/binary-arm/libs/6.61kB/s 0:00:54
main/binary-arm/mail/
main/binary-arm/math/
main/binary-arm/misc/
-- --
lchmod question
I don't think we handle this properly on systems that don't have the
call. Are there any such?
-- --
Do not rely on having a group called "nobody"
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.1.0/gLSB/usernames.html
On Debian it's "nogroup"
-- --
Incorrect timestamps (Debian #100295)
A bit hard to believe, but apparently it happens.
-- --
Win32
Don't detach, because this messes up --srvany.
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00234.html
-- --
FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
server-imposed bandwidth limits
-- --
rsyncd over ssh
There are already some patches to do this.
BitKeeper uses a server whose login shell is set to bkd. That's
probably a reasonable approach.
-- --
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.
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
which should just take a small change to the parser code.
-- --
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.
-- --
Lazy directory creation
With the current common --include '*/' --exclude '*' pattern, people
can end up with many empty directories. We might avoid this by
lazily creating such directories.
-- --
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.
-- --
Allow forcing arbitrary permissions 2002/03/12
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.
I think that would be good too. For example, people uploading files
to a web server might like to say
rsync -avzP --chmod a+rX ./ sourcefrog.net:/home/www/sourcefrog/
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.
Possibly also --chown
(Debian #23628)
-- --
--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-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 more granular verbosity jw 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 --------------------------------------------------------
Update README
-- --
Keep list of open issues and todos on the web site
-- --
Update web site from CVS
-- --
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 --------------------------------------------------------------
Make dry run list all updates 2002/04/03
--dry-run is too dry
Mark Santcroos points out that -n fails to list files which have
only metadata changes, though it probably should.
There may be a Debian bug about this as well.
-- --
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 deamon sessions that just list modules
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)
-- --
Log errors with function that reports process of origin
Use a separate function for reporting errors; prefix it with
"rsync:" or "rsync(remote)", or perhaps even "rsync(local
generator): ".
-- --
verbose output David Stein 2001/12/20
Indicate whether files are new, updated, or deleted
At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
correctly.
-- --
Add reason for transfer to file logging
Explain *why* every file is transferred or not (e.g. "local mtime
123123 newer than 1283198")
-- --
debugging of daemon 2002/04/08
Add an rsyncd.conf parameter to turn on debugging on the server.
-- --
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
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.
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.
We could have a hash table.
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.
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.
I think even if we're using a different symlink mode we don't need
to worry.
Unless we're really clever this will introduce a protocol
incompatibility, so we need to be able to accept the old format as
well.
-- --
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.
-- --
TDB: 2002/03/12
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.
This would neatly eliminate one of the major post-fork shared data
structures.
-- --
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.
-- --
Memory debugger
jra recommends Valgrind:
http://devel-home.kde.org/~sewardj/
-- --
Create release script
Script would:
Update spec files
Build tar file; upload
Send announcement to mailing list and c.o.l.a.
Make freshmeat announcement
Update web site
-- --
Add machines to build farm
Cygwin (on different versions of Win32?)
HP-UX variants (via HP?)
SCO
-- --
PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
File list structure in memory
Rather than one big array, perhaps have a tree in memory mirroring
the directory tree.
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.
-- --
Traverse just one directory at a time
Traverse just one directory at a time. Tridge says it's possible.
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.
-- --
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.
Indeed for transfers over zlib or ssh we can also rely on the
transport to have quite strong protection against corruption.
Perhaps we should have an option to disable this,
analogous to --whole-file, although it would default to
disabled. The file checksum takes up a definite space in
the protocol -- we can either set it to 0, or perhaps just
leave it out.
-- --
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
-- --
If tests are skipped, say why.
-- --
Test daemon feature to disallow particular options.
-- --
Create pipe program for testing
Create pipe program that makes slow/jerky connections for
testing Versions of read() and write() that corrupt the
stream, or abruptly fail
-- --
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
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.
-- --
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