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TODO list for agedu
===================
- flexibility in the HTML report output mode: expose the internal
mechanism for configuring the output filenames, and allow the
user to request individual files with hyperlinks as if the other
files existed. (In particular, functionality of this kind would
enable other modes of use like the built-in --cgi mode, without
me having to anticipate them in detail.)
- add the option (and perhaps even make it default) to address HTML
subpages by pathname rather than by index number. More than just
cosmetic: it means that in a scenario where agedu --cgi is always
running but the index file is updated by cron, subsidiary
pathnames will remain valid across a change.
- we could still be using more of the information coming from
autoconf. Our config.h is defining a whole bunch of HAVE_FOOs for
particular functions (e.g. HAVE_INET_NTOA, HAVE_MEMCHR,
HAVE_FNMATCH). We could usefully supply alternatives for some of
these functions (e.g. cannibalise the PuTTY wildcard matcher for
use in the absence of fnmatch, switch to vanilla truncate() in
the absence of ftruncate); where we don't have alternative code,
it would perhaps be polite to throw an error at configure time
rather than allowing the subsequent build to fail.
+ however, I don't see anything here that looks very
controversial; IIRC it's all in POSIX, for one thing. So more
likely this should simply wait until somebody complains.
- 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.
- abstracting away all the Unix calls so as to enable a full
Windows port. We can already do the difficult bit on Windows
(scanning the filesystem and retrieving atime-analogues).
Everything else is just coding - albeit quite a _lot_ of coding,
since the Unix assumptions are woven quite tightly into the
current code.
+ If nothing else, it's unclear what the user interface properly
ought to be in a Windows port of agedu. A command-line job
exactly like the Unix version might be useful to some people,
but would certainly be strange and confusing to others.
- it might conceivably be useful to support a choice of indexing
strategies. The current "continuous index" mechanism' tradeoff of
taking O(N log N) space in order to be able to support any age
cutoff you like is not going to be ideal for everybody. A second
more conventional "discrete index" mechanism which allows the
user to specify a number of fixed cutoffs and just indexes each
directory on those alone would undoubtedly be a useful thing for
large-scale users. This will require considerable thought about
how to make the indexers pluggable at both index-generation time
and query time.
* however, now we have the cut-down version of the continuous
index, the space saving is less compelling.
- A user requested what's essentially a VFS layer: given multiple
index files and a map of how they fit into an overall namespace,
we should be able to construct the right answers for any query
about the resulting aggregated hierarchy by doing at most
O(number of indexes * normal number of queries) work.
- Support for filtering the scan by ownership and permissions. The
index data structure can't handle this, so we can't build a
single index file admitting multiple subset views; but a user
suggested that the scan phase could record information about
ownership and permissions in the dump file, and then the indexing
phase could filter down to a particular sub-view - which would at
least allow the construction of various subset indices from one
dump file, without having to redo the full disk scan which is the
most time-consuming part of all.
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