4 - flexibility in the HTML report output mode: expose the internal
5 mechanism for configuring the output filenames, and allow the
6 user to request individual files with hyperlinks as if the other
7 files existed. (In particular, functionality of this kind would
8 enable other modes of use like the built-in --cgi mode, without
9 me having to anticipate them in detail.)
11 - non-ASCII character set support
12 + could usefully apply to --title and also to file names
13 + how do we determine the input charset? Via locale, presumably.
14 + how do we do translation? Importing my charset library is one
15 heavyweight option; alternatively, does the native C locale
16 mechanism provide enough functionality to do the job by itself?
17 + in HTML, we would need to decide on an _output_ character set,
18 specify it in a <meta http-equiv> tag, and translate to it from
20 - one option is to make the output charset the same as the
21 input one, in which case all we need is to identify its name
23 - the other option is to make the output charset UTF-8 always
24 and translate to that from everything else
25 - in the web server and CGI modes, it would probably be nicer
26 to move that <meta> tag into a proper HTTP header
27 + even in text mode we would want to parse the filenames in some
28 fashion, due to the unhelpful corner case of Shift-JIS Windows
29 (in which backslashes in the input string must be classified as
30 path separators or the second byte of a two-byte character)
31 - that's really painful, since it will impact string processing
32 of filenames throughout the code
33 - so perhaps a better approach would be to do locale processing
34 of filenames at _scan_ time, and normalise to UTF-8 in both
35 the index and dump files?
36 + involves incrementing the version of the dump-file format
37 + then paths given on the command line are translated
38 quickly to UTF-8 before comparing them against index paths
39 + and now the HTML output side becomes easy, though the text
40 output involves translating back again
41 + but what if the filenames aren't intended to be
42 interpreted in any particular character set (old-style
43 Unix semantics) or in a consistent one?
45 - we could still be using more of the information coming from
46 autoconf. Our config.h is defining a whole bunch of HAVE_FOOs for
47 particular functions (e.g. HAVE_INET_NTOA, HAVE_MEMCHR,
48 HAVE_FNMATCH). We could usefully supply alternatives for some of
49 these functions (e.g. cannibalise the PuTTY wildcard matcher for
50 use in the absence of fnmatch, switch to vanilla truncate() in
51 the absence of ftruncate); where we don't have alternative code,
52 it would perhaps be polite to throw an error at configure time
53 rather than allowing the subsequent build to fail.
54 + however, I don't see anything here that looks very
55 controversial; IIRC it's all in POSIX, for one thing. So more
56 likely this should simply wait until somebody complains.
58 - IPv6 support in the HTTP server
59 * of course, Linux magic auth can still work in this context; we
60 merely have to be prepared to open one of /proc/net/tcp or
61 /proc/net/tcp6 as appropriate.
63 - run-time configuration in the HTTP server
64 * I think this probably works by having a configuration form, or
65 a link pointing to one, somewhere on the report page. If you
66 want to reconfigure anything, you fill in and submit the form;
67 the web server receives HTTP GET with parameters and a
68 referer, adjusts its internal configuration, and returns an
69 HTTP redirect back to the referring page - which it then
70 re-renders in accordance with the change.
71 * All the same options should have their starting states
72 configurable on the command line too.
74 - curses-ish equivalent of the web output
75 + try using xterm 256-colour mode. Can (n)curses handle that? If
76 not, try doing it manually.
77 + I think my current best idea is to bypass ncurses and go
78 straight to terminfo: generate lines of attribute-interleaved
79 text and display them, so we only really need the sequences
80 "go here and display stuff", "scroll up", "scroll down".
81 + Infrastructure work before doing any of this would be to split
82 html.c into two: one part to prepare an abstract data
83 structure describing an HTML-like report (in particular, all
84 the index lookups, percentage calculation, vector arithmetic
85 and line sorting), and another part to generate the literal
86 HTML. Then the former can be reused to produce very similar
87 reports in coloured plain text.
89 - abstracting away all the Unix calls so as to enable a full
90 Windows port. We can already do the difficult bit on Windows
91 (scanning the filesystem and retrieving atime-analogues).
92 Everything else is just coding - albeit quite a _lot_ of coding,
93 since the Unix assumptions are woven quite tightly into the
95 + If nothing else, it's unclear what the user interface properly
96 ought to be in a Windows port of agedu. A command-line job
97 exactly like the Unix version might be useful to some people,
98 but would certainly be strange and confusing to others.
100 - it might conceivably be useful to support a choice of indexing
101 strategies. The current "continuous index" mechanism's tradeoff of
102 taking O(N log N) space in order to be able to support any age
103 cutoff you like is not going to be ideal for everybody. A second
104 more conventional "discrete index" mechanism which allows the
105 user to specify a number of fixed cutoffs and just indexes each
106 directory on those alone would undoubtedly be a useful thing for
107 large-scale users. This will require considerable thought about
108 how to make the indexers pluggable at both index-generation time
110 * however, now we have the cut-down version of the continuous
111 index, the space saving is less compelling.
113 - A user requested what's essentially a VFS layer: given multiple
114 index files and a map of how they fit into an overall namespace,
115 we should be able to construct the right answers for any query
116 about the resulting aggregated hierarchy by doing at most
117 O(number of indexes * normal number of queries) work.
119 - Support for filtering the scan by ownership and permissions. The
120 index data structure can't handle this, so we can't build a
121 single index file admitting multiple subset views; but a user
122 suggested that the scan phase could record information about
123 ownership and permissions in the dump file, and then the indexing
124 phase could filter down to a particular sub-view - which would at
125 least allow the construction of various subset indices from one
126 dump file, without having to redo the full disk scan which is the
127 most time-consuming part of all.
~mdw / sgt / agedu / blob