NetBSD/gnu/libexec/uucp/TODO

Things to do for the Taylor UUCP package.  This list includes some of
my thoughts, but is mostly suggestions from the net.  They are in no
particular order.  Some of the numbers that were in here have been
removed.

2.

John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com> says:

>I think you should accept a broader range of time specifications.
>Consider using getdate() (from your handy Usenet news source code)
>with its high-powered yacc parser.

Of course, getdate() accepts a single date, but we want a range.  A
better syntax would be certainly be nice.

4.

John R MacMillan <chance!john@sq.sq.com> mentions the HDB notion of
services; something like this should be added whenever I get around to
writing a version of cu.

6.

T. William Wells <bill@twwells.com> says:

>Something related that might be useful: when calling the other
>system, at certain times I do not want the other system to gain
>control and begin to send files. If that worked, I could call
>them for e-mail without worrying about getting my newsfeed at
>daytime rates. Unfortunately, I can't ask them to batch me at
>night only; my site gets a multibatch. Note that call-timegrade
>would do as well, provided that the other system respects it but
>I have no way to know that, other than by trying it.

9.

Gordon Burditt <gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org> warns about modifications
to the TZ environment variable, to fool uucico into dialing out at an
inappropriate time.

10.

Gordon Burditt <gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org> says:

>(4) Less important, because few people will have this problem, is a 
>port-specific dialcodes file.  Why?  Well, one system I had was connected
>to 2 inside lines "dial 9 for outside line", and one outside line (which
>doesn't want the 9).  A number of the systems called were "inside", so
>you didn't add the 9 on those lines dialing from inside, but you did add 
>"390" to the 4-digit number if you dialed it via "outside".  Also not 
>unheard of are systems with 2 outside lines that are local to different 
>area codes, or one local outside line and one WATS line (which MUST
>have an area code).
>Example:
>	inside-line Dialcodes		outside-line Dialcodes
>	pbx	""			pbx	"390"
>	local	"9"			local	""
>	nyc	"9-1212"		nyc	"1212"

12.

Ralf E. Stranzenbach <ralf@reswi.ruhr.de> says:

>It would be nice to also have the option of running a shell script each time  
>uucico connects/disconnects a systen. I do not mean shell scripts for dial/in.  
>I would like to do some accounting and batching when the connection  
>establishes.

13.

les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:

>>local-send /usr/spool/uucppublic !/usr/spool/uucpublic/private
>>
>>The directories are searched from left to right, and the last one to
>>match determines whether the file may be sent or not.  This is
>>slightly more general than NOWRITE, since it permits a public
>>directory within a private directory within a public directory,
>>although probably nobody will ever want that.
>
>Interesting... The obvious enhancement is to generalize to shell-like
>wild cards for the READ/WRITE/COMMANDS entries.

14.

Should there be a way for chat scripts to specify the parity to
generate?  I don't think there's much point to specifying what parity
to accept.

17.

The -b and -s switches to uux are not implemented by uuxqt.

18.

If we are supposed to call a system back, we should do it immediately
rather than merely queuing up an empty command file.

19.

Should there be some way to specify the maximum number of retries for
each system using the new configuration scheme?  The maximum number of
retries is currently a compilation parameter.

20.

Write some protocols that support bidirectional transfers.

James Gardiner says:
> MHSnet has this but with also 3  channels per direction.  Each channel
> sends different size packets.  This alows mail, which is usually smaller,
> to overtake news or big files.  Mail being the more important.
> However, with high speed modems, this is no so important.

21.

Support transfers through systems using uucp and uux.  Implement the
``forward-to'' command to allow control of these transfers.

22.

Add an ftp port type which uses anonymous ftp rather than any of the
UUCP protocols to do file transfers.  This would allow ftp work to be
done late at night.

23.

If we don't permit command execution, we still want to delete the work
files we've been given for the command.

24.

Running uucico as a TCP server doesn't work right because only root
can bind a port less than 1024.  This is checked by effective user id,
and our effective user id is always uucp.  If we have saved set user
id we could switch the effective user id to root and then back again;
otherwise we have to not use setuid and start the program as root.
Actually, we could use another program to start as root, bind the
port, and invoke uucico.  Or we could use a setuid program and pass
the file descriptor back using a socketpair.  Or we could just use
inetd.

31.

David Nugent: add a -C option to uucico to only call the system if
there was work to do.

32.

It would be nice if uucico could sleep until a line was available.
This is complicated by the possibility of wanting to wait for any of
several different lines, and one would really want some sort of
semaphore function to do it right.  If the available lines could be
sorted, then each could be assigned to a byte in a line lock file.
Looking for a line could be done by sleeping on a read lock on all
possible lines.  Once it came through, write locks would be attempted.
If they all failed, somebody else snuck in, so you would sleep on a
read lock again.  This isn't great because a process could be starved,
but it might be better than nothing.

This could be tied in to uucp and uux, such that they wouldn't
actually fire up uucico unless a line was known to be available; an
additional switch would be used to fire up uucico anyhow (or one could
switch the default behaviour and the switch).

So how do you sort the lines?  You could just use the index in the
port (or Devices) file, but what if multiple ports used the same
physical device?  Hmmm.

33.

David Nugent: allow the minimum wait time to be specified for a
system, such that calls to that system are not made more frequently
than, say, once an hour.

34.

Bob Izenberg: HDB UUCP will retry a call once if it fails.  This can
be done in my system by adding an alternate and repeating the phone
number.  Should there be a configuration parameter to do it in a
simpler way?

43.

David Nugent: it would be nice to be able to set debugging, log, and
statistics files on a site by site basis.

74.

Yanek Martinson: allow each system to independently choose whether to
permit shell execution.

75.

Mike Park: we should accept an Shere=foo message with an alias of the
system we are calling.

81.

Marty Shannon: log reason for dial failure (chat-fail string) in
.Status file.

82.

Support restart of failed transfers a la SVR4 UUCP.

83.

Switch between 'M' and 'S' correctly in the BNU log file output.

85.

Les Mikesell: add TLI and TLIS connection ability.

86.

Les Mikesell: allow a separate program to be specified to handle the
communications with a particular system.

105.

T. William Wells: close and open the Debug file after each file
transfer.  Alternatively, cycle through a series of Debug file names
every 1000 lines or so.

106.

Marty Shannon: add a time command for ports, to specify when they may
be used.

112.

Franc,ois Pinard: allow defaults to appear at the top of the dial file
(and presumably of the port file as well).

115.

T. William Wells: new options for uustat:
	-i display job ids only
	-K interactively kill jobs
Also, there should perhaps be a configuration option to request uustat
to only display jobs submitted by the user running uustat, except for
root and uucp.

117.

Marc Unangst: provide some way to change the debugging level of a
running uucico.  T. William Wells suggests having it read a file to
change arbitrary configuration information, although obviously one has
to be careful of what gets changed while a connection is active.

120.

Jarmo Raiha: new chat-fail commands: one to not update the status file
and require a retry wait, and one to permit the string to occur a few
times before reporting an error.

121.

Jarmo Raiha: uucp and uux fail to copy a file that is not world
readable, because they are running under the wrong euid.  They should
switch back and forth as necessary.

124.

Peter da Silva: perhaps there should be a ``chat-end-program'' command
to let a program be run after the initial handshake has been completed
and the protocol has been selected and turned on.  This would let
people run stty to change their terminal parameters.

128.

Richard Stallman: have an interactive program to set up a chat script.
It would let you type directly to the port, recording what you type as
send strings and recording what comes back from the other side as
expect strings.

129.

Use POSIX fcntl locks when possible instead of creating a lock file.

130.

Chip Salzenberg: BSD lets you override the timeout for a particular
expect string by using a trailing ~.

132.

Franc,ois Pinard: cut the total number of 'g' protocol errors by some
fraction every X bytes.  T. William Wells: only abort if you get a
certain percentage of errors out of a certain number of packets.

134.

Chip Salzenberg: give .XQTDIR a mode of 0700 and the files put into it
a mode of 0444.

136.

Thomas Fischer: every so often (1/2 hour) check to see whether there
is any high grade work to be done and process it.  This should happen
even on the slave, which means the slave needs some way to ask the
master to hang up.  I think some uucico's do this by sending CYM.

137.

Support control over local executions by recognizing the local system
name in the configuration file.  Think about what is needed to use the
same configuration files on multiple systems.

138.

T. William Wells: BNU apparently uses a file named A.whatever to hold
the line number reached in current C. file processing.  This is a
hack, and won't work right with size control anyhow, but
fsysdep_did_work could, for example, clobber the first byte in the
line to a # or something to mark that it had been finished.  Still a
hack, but a better one.

139.

Patrick Smith: incorporate patches to generate full debugging traces
with less debugging file overhead.  The debugging file repeats too
much information at great length right now--not good.

140.

Mark Pizzolato: put in the newer, better, 'g' protocol checksum
calculation routine.

141.

Franc,ois Pinard: batch up pauses and delays in chat scripts and do
them all at once in a single system call.  This is particularly useful
for pauses on systems which don't support subsecond sleeps.  For
everything else it's a fairly minor optimization.

142.

Franc,ois Pinard: give uustat an option to requeue jobs to another
system.  This only makes a lot of sense for rmail executions, but it's
fairly easy to do for any type of command.  I think uucico does all
the file checking needed to ensure that this doesn't break security,
but that should be double-checked.

143.

David J. MacKenzie: write a program to convert between the various
different configuration styles.  This should not be too difficult.

144.

T. William Wells: add a -g option to uucico to permit specifying the
maximum grade to be transferred at that time.  This could restrict the
timegrade command further, but should not be permitted to override it.

145.

T. William Wells: if uucico or uuxqt get started with bad arguments,
put an indication in the log file since stderr may be /dev/null.

146.

Richard Todd: it would be nice to sometimes be able to request the
other side to turn on debugging.

147.

Bart Schaefer: some more possible options for uucico:
    -R reverse roles (hangup immediately).  Not too exciting.
    some method to restrict calling to particular systems.

148.

Jarmo Raiha: some method to control the work queue at the remote end.
This could get awfully general, though.

149.

The interaction of the time command and defaults can be confusing,
since any time command in the actual system entry, even a fairly
specific one, will wipe out the default entry.  Not sure what can be
done about this.

150.