todo

Rsync 3.0.5 source code

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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

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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

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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.

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verbose output					David Stein	2001/12/20
  
  At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
  correctly.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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?

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TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------

Torture test

  Something that just keeps running rsync continuously over a data set
  likely to generate problems.

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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.

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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.

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Test large files

  Sparse and non-sparse

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Create mutator program for testing

  Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ...

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Create configure option to enable dangerous tests

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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

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Create test makefile target for some tests

  Separate makefile target to run rough tests -- or perhaps
  just run them every time?

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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.

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http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/


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rsyncable gzip patch

  Exhaustive, tortuous testing

  Cleanups?

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rsyncsplit as alternative to real integration with gzip?

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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/

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