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  - work out what to do about atimes on directories in the absence of
   7    the Linux syscall magic
   8     * one option is to read them during the scan and reinstate them
   9       after each recursion pop. Race-condition prone.
  10     * marking them in a distinctive colour in the reports is another
  11       option.
  12     * a third option is simply to ignore space taken up by
  13       directories in the first place; inaccurate but terribly simple.
  14     * incidentally, sometimes open(...,O_NOATIME) will fail, and
  15       then we have to fall back to ordinary open. Be prepared to do
  16       this, which probably means getting rid of the icky macro
  17       hackery in du.c and turning it into a more sensible run-time
  18       abstraction layer.
  19
  20  - polish the plain-text output to make it look more like du
  21     + configurable recursive output depth
  22     + show the right bits last
  23
  24  - cross-Unix portability:
  25     + use autoconf
  26        * configure use of stat64
  27        * configure use of /proc/net/tcp
  28        * configure use of /dev/random
  29        * configure use of Linux syscall magic replacing readdir
  30           + later glibcs have fdopendir, hooray! So we can use that
  31             too, if it's available and O_NOATIME is too.
  32        * what do we do elsewhere about _GNU_SOURCE?
  33
  34  - man page, licence, --version.
  35
  36 Future possibilities:
  37
  38  - IPv6 support in the HTTP server
  39     * of course, Linux magic auth can still work in this context; we
  40       merely have to be prepared to open one of /proc/net/tcp or
  41       /proc/net/tcp6 as appropriate.
  42
  43  - run-time configuration in the HTTP server
  44     * I think this probably works by having a configuration form, or
  45       a link pointing to one, somewhere on the report page. If you
  46       want to reconfigure anything, you fill in and submit the form;
  47       the web server receives HTTP GET with parameters and a
  48       referer, adjusts its internal configuration, and returns an
  49       HTTP redirect back to the referring page - which it then
  50       re-renders in accordance with the change.
  51     * All the same options should have their starting states
  52       configurable on the command line too.
  53
  54  - curses-ish equivalent of the web output
  55     + try using xterm 256-colour mode. Can (n)curses handle that? If
  56       not, try doing it manually.
  57     + I think my current best idea is to bypass ncurses and go
  58       straight to terminfo: generate lines of attribute-interleaved
  59       text and display them, so we only really need the sequences
  60       "go here and display stuff", "scroll up", "scroll down".
  61     + I think the attribute-interleaved text might be possible to do
  62       cunningly, as well: we autodetect a basically VT-style
  63       terminal, and add 256-colour sequences on the end. So, for
  64       instance, we might set ANSI-yellow foreground, set ANSI-red
  65       background, _then_ set both foreground and background to the
  66       appropriate xterm 256-colour, and then display some
  67       appropriate character which would have given the right blend
  68       of the ANSI-16 fore and background colours. Then the same
  69       display code should gracefully degrade in the face of a
  70       terminal which doesn't support xterm-256.
  71        * current best plan is to simulate the xterm-256 shading from
  72          0/5 to 5/5 by doing space, colon and hash in colour A on
  73          colour B background, then hash, colon and space in B on A
  74          background.
  75     + Infrastructure work before doing any of this would be to split
  76       html.c into two: one part to prepare an abstract data
  77       structure describing an HTML-like report (in particular, all
  78       the index lookups, percentage calculation, vector arithmetic
  79       and line sorting), and another part to generate the literal
  80       HTML. Then the former can be reused to produce very similar
  81       reports in coloured plain text.
  82
  83  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724290.aspx suggest
  84    modern Windowses support atime-equivalents, so a Windows port is
  85    possible in principle.
  86     + For a full Windows port, would need to modify the current
  87       structure a lot, to abstract away (at least) memory-mapping of
  88       files, details of disk scan procedure, networking for httpd.
  89       Unclear what the right UI would be on Windows, too;
  90       command-line exactly as now might be considered just a
  91       _little_ unfriendly. Or perhaps not.
  92     + Alternatively, a much easier approach would be to write a
  93       Windows version of just the --scan-dump mode, which does a
  94       filesystem scan via the Windows API and generates a valid
  95       agedu dump file on standard output. Then one would simply feed
  96       that over the network connection of one's choice to the rest
  97       of agedu running on Unix as usual.