Need ideas for project

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 12:16:46AM -0800, zahed wrote:
> I would definitely like to know what are some of the issues concerning
> rsync. May be I can then select one or two issues and try to solve
> them.

Here are some ideas I came up with off the top of my head:

  - Look into MS Windows ACLs (which are non-Posix) and see if they can
    be supported.  I added support for OS X's non-Posix ACLs, so it
    might be possible.

  - Getting TLS support on the daemon sockets finished (see enhancement
    bug in bugzilla).

  - I was imagining a way to get remote-to-remote transfers working.  It
    should be possible if the client rsync starts up two remote rsyncs
    in --server mode (with appropriate options sent to each one),
    handles the initial handshaking, sends any other initial info that
    is needed to each (e.g. it may need to send excludes to both), and
    then acts as a go-between for the data that is flowing.  For the
    most part it would need to just select on the incoming & outgoing
    file handles and pass the data through, but it would also need to
    recognize client-oriented things (such as messages) and output them
    rather than forwarding them.  Other complications include command-
    line options that can be ambiguous (e.g. --rsync-path, --rsh), so
    there is a lot to figure out for this.

  - I have a DB proposal I mentioned a while back that I haven't had
    time to work on yet (though I will hopefully get to sometime soon,
    since the 3.0.0 release is wrapping up):

      http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.rsync.general/15847

    This is still in the design stage.  Comments, design suggestions,
    code all gratefully accepted.  However, if you're looking for solo
    work (as opposed to something that I'd be sticking my nose into),
    this isn't it.

As for Matt's superlifter suggestion, that's quite a long-term project.
Anytime that you start a code-base over again, you will spend a lot of
time working through areas that were already solved in the old code, and
revisiting the bugs of the past (since all new code is buggy, and the
reasons for why some things are done in certain ways are not always
obvious or well documented).  It would certainly be a fun thing to work
on, though.

..wayne..