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This is a list of possible work projects within openrsync, rated by difficulty.

First, porting: see
[Porting](https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync/blob/master/README.md#Portability)
for information on this topic.
I've included the specific security porting topics below.

This list also does not include adding support for features (e.g., **-u** and
so on).  The **-a** feature is probably most important, and involves a little
legwork in the protocol getting **-g** and **-u** passing around file modes.
I would rate this as easy/medium.

- Easy: speed up the uid/gid mapping/remapping with a simple table.
  Right now, the code in 
  [ids.c](https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync/blob/master/ids.c)
  is simple, but could easily bottleneck with a large number of groups
  and files with **-g**.

- Easy: add a hashtable to `blk_find()` in
  [blocks.c](https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync/blob/master/blocks.c)
  for quickly looking up fast-hash matches.

- Easy: print more statistics, such as transfer times and rates.

- Easy: tighten the [pledge(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2) and
  [unveil(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/unveil.2) to work with **-n**, as
  it does not touch files.

- Easy: find the shared path for all input files and
  [unveil(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/unveil.2) only the shared path
  instead of each one.

- Medium: have the log messages when multiplex writing (server mode) is
  enabled by flushed out through the multiplex channel.
  Right now, they're emitted on `stderr` just like with the client.

- Medium: porting the security precautions
  ([unveil(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/unveil.2),
  [pledge(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2)) to
  [FreeBSD](https://www.freebsd.org)'s
  [Capsicum](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum).
  Without this in place, you're exposing your file-system to whatever is
  coming down over the wire.
  This is certainly possible, as openrsync makes exclusive use of the "at"
  functions (e.g., [openat(2)](https://man.openbsd.org/openat.2)) for working
  with files.

- Hard: the same, but for Linux.

- Hard: make the sender loop use an event handler on incoming and
  outgoing I/O.  Right now it moves in lockstep and can be considerably
  more responsive to requests by reading them in immediately instead of
  having them sit in the receiver queue while it waits for disc IO.
  This isn't *that* hard.

- Hard: once the sender loop is optimised, the uploader can also queue
  up block metadata to send on-demand instead of reading in the file
  then sending, then reading again, then sending.

In general, be careful with the last two.
The rsync protocol is quite brittle and prone to deadlocking if senders
or receivers send too much data and clog output buffers.
So I suppose the hardest point, now that the protocol has been
documented, is:

- Hardest: make the entire system use a event-loop and loop over
  buffered data with a fine-grained state machine.

I guess that will wait for openrsync v2.

Above all, `grep FIXME *.c *.h` and start from there.