mdw@git.distorted.org.uk Git - sgt/agedu/blob - TODO

   1 TODO list for agedu
   2 ===================
   3
   4 Before it's non-embarrassingly releasable:
   5
   6  - more flexible running modes
   7     + at least some ability to chain actions within the same run:
   8       "agedu -s dirname -w" would seem handy.
   9
  10  - work out what to do about atimes on directories in the absence of
  11    the Linux syscall magic
  12     * one option is to read them during the scan and reinstate them
  13       after each recursion pop. Race-condition prone.
  14     * marking them in a distinctive colour in the reports is another
  15       option.
  16     * a third option is simply to ignore space taken up by
  17       directories in the first place; inaccurate but terribly simple.
  18     * incidentally, sometimes open(...,O_NOATIME) will fail, and
  19       then we have to fall back to ordinary open. Be prepared to do
  20       this, which probably means getting rid of the icky macro
  21       hackery in du.c and turning it into a more sensible run-time
  22       abstraction layer.
  23
  24  - polish the plain-text output to make it look more like du
  25     + configurable recursive output depth
  26     + show the right bits last
  27
  28  - cross-Unix portability:
  29     + use autoconf
  30        * configure use of stat64
  31        * configure use of /proc/net/tcp
  32        * configure use of /dev/random
  33        * configure use of Linux syscall magic replacing readdir
  34           + later glibcs have fdopendir, hooray! So we can use that
  35             too, if it's available and O_NOATIME is too.
  36        * what do we do elsewhere about _GNU_SOURCE?
  37
  38  - man page, licence.
  39
  40 Future directions:
  41
  42  - IPv6 support in the HTTP server
  43
  44  - run-time configuration in the HTTP server
  45     * I think this probably works by having a configuration form, or
  46       a link pointing to one, somewhere on the report page. If you
  47       want to reconfigure anything, you fill in and submit the form;
  48       the web server receives HTTP GET with parameters and a
  49       referer, adjusts its internal configuration, and returns an
  50       HTTP redirect back to the referring page - which it then
  51       re-renders in accordance with the change.
  52     * All the same options should have their starting states
  53       configurable on the command line too.
  54
  55  - curses-ish equivalent of the web output
  56     + try using xterm 256-colour mode. Can (n)curses handle that? If
  57       not, try doing it manually.
  58     + I think my current best idea is to bypass ncurses and go
  59       straight to terminfo: generate lines of attribute-interleaved
  60       text and display them, so we only really need the sequences
  61       "go here and display stuff", "scroll up", "scroll down".
  62     + I think the attribute-interleaved text might be possible to do
  63       cunningly, as well: we autodetect a basically VT-style
  64       terminal, and add 256-colour sequences on the end. So, for
  65       instance, we might set ANSI-yellow foreground, set ANSI-red
  66       background, _then_ set both foreground and background to the
  67       appropriate xterm 256-colour, and then display some
  68       appropriate character which would have given the right blend
  69       of the ANSI-16 fore and background colours. Then the same
  70       display code should gracefully degrade in the face of a
  71       terminal which doesn't support xterm-256.
  72        * current best plan is to simulate the xterm-256 shading from
  73          0/5 to 5/5 by doing space, colon and hash in colour A on
  74          colour B background, then hash, colon and space in B on A
  75          background.
  76     + Infrastructure work before doing any of this would be to split
  77       html.c into two: one part to prepare an abstract data
  78       structure describing an HTML-like report (in particular, all
  79       the index lookups, percentage calculation, vector arithmetic
  80       and line sorting), and another part to generate the literal
  81       HTML. Then the former can be reused to produce very similar
  82       reports in coloured plain text.
  83
  84  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724290.aspx suggest
  85    modern Windowses support atime-equivalents, so a Windows port is
  86    possible in principle.
  87     + For a full Windows port, would need to modify the current
  88       structure a lot, to abstract away (at least) memory-mapping of
  89       files, details of disk scan procedure, networking for httpd.
  90       Unclear what the right UI would be on Windows, too;
  91       command-line exactly as now might be considered just a
  92       _little_ unfriendly. Or perhaps not.
  93     + Alternatively, a much easier approach would be to write a
  94       Windows version of just the --scan-dump mode, which does a
  95       filesystem scan via the Windows API and generates a valid
  96       agedu dump file on standard output. Then one would simply feed
  97       that over the network connection of one's choice to the rest
  98       of agedu running on Unix as usual.