-*- indented-text -*- URGENT --------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT ------------------------------------------------------------ Cross-test versions 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. 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 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 --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. Performance Traverse just one directory at a time. Tridge says it's possible. Can possibly also be smarter about memory use while looking for hard links by reducing the refcount as we find alternative names. IPv6 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. Errors 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. File attributes Device major/minor numbers should be at least 32 bits each. See http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-November/005357.html 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. zlib Perhaps don't use our own zlib. Will we actually be incompatible, or just be slightly less efficient? 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 PLATFORMS ------------------------------------------------------------ Win32 Don't detach, because this messes up --srvany. 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. BUILD FARM ----------------------------------------------------------- Add machines AMDAHL UTS (Dave Dykstra) Cygwin (on different versions of Win32?) HP-UX variants (via HP?) SCO 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. hang/timeout friendliness On internationalization Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms that don't have it. Solicit translations. Does anyone care? 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.