-*- indented-text -*-
-URGENT ---------------------------------------------------------------
+BUGS ---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+rsync-url barfs on upload
+
+ rsync foo rsync://localhost/transfer/
+
+ Fix the parser.
+
+
+There seems to be a bug with hardlinks
+
+ mbp/2 build$ ls -l /tmp/a /tmp/b -i
+ /tmp/a:
+ total 32
+ 2568307 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a1
+ 2568307 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a2
+ 2568307 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a3
+ 2568310 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a4
+ 2568310 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a5
+ 2568310 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b1
+ 2568310 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b2
+ 2568310 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b3
+
+ /tmp/b:
+ total 32
+ 2568309 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a1
+ 2568309 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a2
+ 2568309 -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a3
+ 2568311 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a4
+ 2568311 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a5
+ 2568311 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b1
+ 2568311 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b2
+ 2568311 -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b3
+ mbp/2 build$ rm -r /tmp/b && ./rsync -avH /tmp/a/ /tmp/b
+ building file list ... done
+ created directory /tmp/b
+ ./
+ a1
+ a4
+ a2 => a1
+ a3 => a2
+ wrote 350 bytes read 52 bytes 804.00 bytes/sec
+ total size is 232 speedup is 0.58
+ mbp/2 build$ rm -r /tmp/b
+ mbp/2 build$ ls -l /tmp/b
+ ls: /tmp/b: No such file or directory
+ mbp/2 build$ rm -r /tmp/b && ./rsync -avH /tmp/a/ /tmp/b
+ rm: cannot remove `/tmp/b': No such file or directory
+ mbp/2 build$ rm -f -r /tmp/b && ./rsync -avH /tmp/a/ /tmp/b
+ building file list ... done
+ created directory /tmp/b
+ ./
+ a1
+ a4
+ a2 => a1
+ a3 => a2
+ wrote 350 bytes read 52 bytes 804.00 bytes/sec
+ total size is 232 speedup is 0.58
+ mbp/2 build$ ls -l /tmp/b
+ total 32
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a1
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a2
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a3
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a4
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a5
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b1
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b2
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b3
+ mbp/2 build$ ls -l /tmp/a
+ total 32
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a1
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a2
+ -rw-rw-r-- 3 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a3
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a4
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 a5
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b1
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b2
+ -rw-rw-r-- 5 mbp mbp 29 Mar 25 17:30 b3
+
+
+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
+ I don't think we handle this properly on systems that don't have the
+ call. Are there any such?
-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.
some testing and also be the most common case for having different
versions and not being able to upgrade.
+--no-blocking-io might be broken
+
+ in the same way as --no-whole-file; somebody needs to check.
+
+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"
+
+DAEMON --------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+
+FEATURES ------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+--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.
+
+
use chroot
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.
+
+supplementary groups
+
+ 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.
+
+
+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.
+
Performance
Traverse just one directory at a time. Tridge says it's possible.
start, which makes us use a lot of memory and also not pipeline
network access as much as we could.
+
+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.
+ 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
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.
+
+
Memory accounting
At exit, show how much memory was used for the file list, etc.
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.
+
Hard-link handling
At the moment hardlink handling is very expensive, so it's off by
default. It does not need to be so.
+ 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.
+
We can rule out hardlinked directories since they will probably
screw us up in all kinds of ways. They simply should not be used.
might need a little program to check whether several names refer to
the same file.
-IPv6
+
+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
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
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.
+
+
File attributes
Device major/minor numbers should be at least 32 bits each. See
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?
+ 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.
+
logging
monitor progress in a log file can do so more easily. See
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=48108
-rsyncd over ssh
+ At the connections that just get a list of modules are not logged,
+ but they should be.
- There are already some patches to do this.
+ 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)
+
+ After we get the @RSYNCD greeting from the server, we know it's
+ version but we have not yet sent the command line, so we could just
+ remove the -z option if the server is too old.
+
+ For ssh invocation it's not so simple, because we actually use the
+ command line to start the remote process. However, we only actually
+ do compression in token.c, and we could therefore once we discover
+ the remote version emit an error if it's too old. I'm not sure if
+ that's a good tradeoff or not.
+
+
+proxy authentication
+
+ 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
+
+ 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.
+
+
+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
+
+TDB:
+
+ 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.
+
+
+chmod:
+
+ 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
+
+ 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?
+
+ (Suggestion from david.e.sewell)
+
+
+Incorrect timestamps (Debian #100295)
+
+ A bit hard to believe, but apparently it happens.
+
+
+Check "refuse options works"
+
+ We need a test case for this...
+
+ Was this broken when we changed to popt?
+
+
+PERFORMANCE ----------------------------------------------------------
+
+MD4 file_sum
+
+ 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.
+
+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?
+
+String area code
+
+ Test whether this is actually faster than just using malloc(). If
+ it's not (anymore), throw it out.
+
PLATFORMS ------------------------------------------------------------
we are correct to call close(), because shutdown() discards
untransmitted data.
+
+DEVELOPMENT ----------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+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/
+
+Release script
+
+ Update spec files
+
+ Build tar file; upload
+
+ Send announcement to mailing list and c.o.l.a.
+
+ Make freshmeat announcement
+
+ Update web site
+
+
+
+TESTING --------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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 both up and down from the current release
+ to all old 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 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
+
+Mutator program
+
+ Insert bytes, delete bytes, swap blocks, ...
+
+configure option to enable dangerous tests
+
+If tests are skipped, say why.
+
+Test daemon feature to disallow particular options.
+
+Pipe program that makes slow/jerky connections.
+
+Versions of read() and write() that corrupt the stream, or abruptly fail
+
+Separate makefile target to run rough tests -- or perhaps just run
+them every time?
+
+Test "refuse options" works
+
+ What about for --recursive?
+
+ If you specify an unrecognized option here, you should get an error.
+
+
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.
+
+
BUILD FARM -----------------------------------------------------------
Add machines
- AMDAHL UTS (Dave Dykstra)
-
Cygwin (on different versions of Win32?)
HP-UX variants (via HP?)
SCO
-NICE -----------------------------------------------------------------
-SIGHUP
+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
+
+ At the connections that just get a list of modules are not logged,
+ but they should be.
+
+ 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)
- Re-read config file (just exec() ourselves) rather than exiting.
+ Use a separate function for reporting errors; prefix it with
+ "rsync:" or "rsync(remote)", or perhaps even "rsync(local
+ generator): ".
+
+verbose output
+
+ Indicate whether files are new, updated, or deleted
+
+ At end of transfer, show how many files were or were not transferred
+ correctly.
+
+-vv
+
+ Explain *why* every file is transferred or not (e.g. "local mtime
+ 123123 newer than 1283198")
+
+
+debugging of daemon
+
+ Add an rsyncd.conf parameter to turn on debugging on the server.
+
+
+
+NICE -----------------------------------------------------------------
--no-detach and --no-fork options
hang/timeout friendliness
-verbose output
-
- Indicate whether files are new, updated, or deleted
-
internationalization
Change to using gettext(). Probably need to ship this for platforms
Solicit translations.
- Does anyone care?
+ 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.
rsyncsh
current host, directory and so on. We can probably even do
completion of remote filenames.
-%K%
+
+RELATED PROJECTS -----------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
git.samba.org / rsync.git / blobdiff