Invent a cunning means of faking plausible atimes for directories,

[sgt/agedu] / TODO

TODO list for agedu
===================

Before it's non-embarrassingly releasable:

 - cross-Unix portability:
    + use autoconf
       * configure use of stat64
       * configure use of /proc/net/tcp
       * configure use of /dev/random
       * configure use of Linux syscall magic replacing readdir
          + later glibcs have fdopendir, hooray! So we can use that
	    too, if it's available and O_NOATIME is too.
       * what do we do elsewhere about _GNU_SOURCE?

 - tweak the short options. I think dump files should be a
   second-class feature in general, so that --dump and --load should
   be represented by capital options. That leaves -d free to be
   --depth, which I think is more generally useful.
    * while I'm tweaking the options list, "[all modes]" ought to
      say "[most modes]", due to --scan-dump.

 - New mode: --remove, to destroy the data file. Handy for
   totally self-contained usage: "-s . -w -R".

 - man page, --version.

Future possibilities:

 - IPv6 support in the HTTP server
    * of course, Linux magic auth can still work in this context; we
      merely have to be prepared to open one of /proc/net/tcp or
      /proc/net/tcp6 as appropriate.

 - run-time configuration in the HTTP server
    * I think this probably works by having a configuration form, or
      a link pointing to one, somewhere on the report page. If you
      want to reconfigure anything, you fill in and submit the form;
      the web server receives HTTP GET with parameters and a
      referer, adjusts its internal configuration, and returns an
      HTTP redirect back to the referring page - which it then
      re-renders in accordance with the change.
    * All the same options should have their starting states
      configurable on the command line too.

 - curses-ish equivalent of the web output
    + try using xterm 256-colour mode. Can (n)curses handle that? If
      not, try doing it manually.
    + I think my current best idea is to bypass ncurses and go
      straight to terminfo: generate lines of attribute-interleaved
      text and display them, so we only really need the sequences
      "go here and display stuff", "scroll up", "scroll down".
    + Infrastructure work before doing any of this would be to split
      html.c into two: one part to prepare an abstract data
      structure describing an HTML-like report (in particular, all
      the index lookups, percentage calculation, vector arithmetic
      and line sorting), and another part to generate the literal
      HTML. Then the former can be reused to produce very similar
      reports in coloured plain text.

 - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724290.aspx suggest
   modern Windowses support atime-equivalents, so a Windows port is
   possible in principle.
    + For a full Windows port, would need to modify the current
      structure a lot, to abstract away (at least) memory-mapping of
      files, details of disk scan procedure, networking for httpd.
      Unclear what the right UI would be on Windows, too;
      command-line exactly as now might be considered just a
      _little_ unfriendly. Or perhaps not.
    + Alternatively, a much easier approach would be to write a
      Windows version of just the --scan-dump mode, which does a
      filesystem scan via the Windows API and generates a valid
      agedu dump file on standard output. Then one would simply feed
      that over the network connection of one's choice to the rest
      of agedu running on Unix as usual.