rsync kioslave - future direction

[Brad Hards]

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I have it very roughly working, in that I can browse some directories and 
download at least some files to view in konqueror. Obligatory screen shot at 
http://www.cuneata.net/rsync-kio.html

It is a basic wrapper around the rsync binary. So I'm not yet getting any real 
benefit from rsync - I'm effectively always in --whole-file mode. This 
kind-of makes sense, because I'm trying to present the remote system as a 
local filesystem.

I still have a lot of things to go, however before I get too far into it, I 
want to check in with the rsync gods about future direction.

I take it that most of the future work is going to be on something called 
superlifter, and that major changes to rsync are not expected. So a 
significant re-architecting of the rsync code into a library isn't likely.

The major problems with just wrapping the rsync binary are that:
* It is really inefficient, especially with large files, because I'm 
downloading the remote file into a tempfile, and then reading the tempfile 
into the kioslave, and then konqueror reads from the tempfile and writes out 
to another tempfile. This ignores any tempfile usage within rsync. Ideally 
I'd be reading from stdout straight into konqueror.
* Handling the motd is still a problem. At this stage I'm ignoring it.

So the real decision is whether to try and copy bits of the rsync code, and 
risk diverging from the codebase, or keep wrapping the executable, and just 
suffer from the performance problems.

I'm also open to ideas about how to take some advantage of the rsync 
capabilities.

If anyone has given any thought to this, I'd be keen to hear from you. Hell, 
I'd be appreciative if anyone even noticed.

Brad

- -- 
http://linux.conf.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Aust. I'm registered. Are you?
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