[GSoC 2017] New Idea about rsync

[Anoop C S]

On Wed, 2017-03-15 at 02:08 +0800, Shanker Wang via samba-technical wrote:
> Hi, there
> 
> Hope this e-mail finds you well. I'm interested in GSoC program. And
> I have an idea about the tool rsync.
> 

Please make use of relevant lists from https://rsync.samba.org/lists.html

> I've been one of the admins of TUNA mirror site (mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.
> edu.cn), which provides mirrors for a large amount of open source 
> softwares. Late last year, as one of the top two mirror sites in China,
> rsync request from other sites made the load on our storage system 
> grow largely. I realized that to initialize a rsync connection, the 
> requested directory would be scanned recursively, which was making 
> massive IO operations and causing cache miss. To reduce the stress, 
> I did some modification to `rsync` and was able to cache the attributes 
> of the files. The result was fine, and is published on 
> https://github.com/tuna/rsync and further documentation is on  
> https://github.com/tuna/rsync/blob/master/README-huai.md
> 
> The modification itself was successful. During the process of the modifi-
> cation, however, I found rsync is lack of documentation, especially the
> communication protocol. [https://rsync.samba.org/how-rsync-works.html]
> was one of a few documents for my reference. I noticed that samba is
> participating the 2017 GSoC project and rsync is maintained by you. As
> a result, I wonder if I can do something for the documentation for the
> rsync protocol.
> 
> The achievement of this idea, as I expect, will include a detailed document
> about the whole rsync protocol, which can be relied on if someone is 
> working on another implementation of the rsync. I will document the 
> latest protocol, as well as historical versions if there is time left.
> 
> I wonder if this idea is appropriate for a summer project. I also need 
> your suggestion on my idea.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Miao Wang