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Annotation of embedaddon/mtr/TODO, revision 1.1.1.2

1.1       misho       1: 
                      2: Hi everyone, 
                      3: 
                      4: This is the "todo" file for mtr. I just realized that some people
                      5: might think that this is all in MY queue to implement. That is not
                      6: true: This is the "for everybody" todo list. Feel free to pick a
                      7: "project" and implement something off this list.
                      8: 
                      9: Students: Feel free to take up one of these as a programming exercise
                     10: for one of your courses.
                     11: 
                     12: Everybody: If you want to start on something, contact me first, so
                     13: that the effort isn't wasted by someone who finishes just a tad
                     14: earlier. I'll happily provide "coaching" to anyone who wants to
                     15: implement something on this list. That way we get the design of
                     16: these things the way I like them. This should result in a better
                     17: maintainable mtr.
                     18: 
                     19: Oh, Feel free to provide suggestions for this list. 
                     20: 
                     21: 
                     22: -- REW
                     23: 
                     24: ----------------------------------------------------------------------
                     25: 
                     26: 
                     27: - Stuff to implement:
                     28: 
                     29:   - Allow mtr to log the return packets, for later analysis.
                     30:     Done: 0.25 . Todo: allow the user interface(s) to work while
                     31:     still logging to a file. Write a "logfile displaying" mode to
                     32:     mtr.
                     33: 
                     34:   - Request timestamping at the remote site.
                     35:        Andreas Fasbender has an algorithm that will allow us to 
                     36:        convert these measurements into one-way measurements, not just
                     37:        round-trip.
                     38: 
                     39:   - allow "keyboard navigation" in the GTK version. 
                     40: 
                     41:   - Keep all packets and make the "best" and "worst" columns show the
                     42:     xx-th percentile....
                     43: 
                     44:   - Being able to expand the "column width" of the hosts listed would 
                     45:     be nice, too.
                     46: 
1.1.1.2 ! misho      47:   - Display per host stats when multiple servers respond at a particular
        !            48:     hop count.
        !            49: 
1.1       misho      50: 
                     51: - Bugs to fix?
                     52: 
                     53:   - Do something useful if host couldn't be resolved. 
                     54:        -- Done. 
                     55: 
                     56:   - Revert to curses mode even if DISPLAY is set, but a problem
                     57:     prevents us from running in X11 mode.
                     58:        -->  The problem is that gtk_init simply calls exit for us if
                     59:             it finds a problem. Tricky! Suggestions welcome. 
                     60:        --> Call "gtk_check_init" when available. (i.e. new enough
                     61:            (1.2?) GTK version).
                     62: 
                     63: - Nice to have:
                     64: 
                     65:   - stop sending packets when a new host is getting entered. 
                     66: 
                     67:   - Show state ("looking up host") while doing the DNS lookup for a new
                     68:     host.
                     69: 
                     70:   - to have a choice of icmp, tcp, and udp pings. -- Matt Martini
                     71: 
                     72:   - Autoconf 2.13 has a neat function that can be used to find the 
                     73:     res_init function: 
                     74: 
                     75:           AC_SEARCH_LIBS(res_init, bind resolv, ,
                     76:              AC_MSG_ERROR(No resolver library found))
                     77: 
                     78:     At the moment (march 1999) autoconf 2.13 is still too new to require 
                     79:     everyone to upgrade. About a year from now we can put this in....
                     80: 
                     81:   - Implement rfc2317 mechanism to do reverse lookups for networks that
                     82:     have DNS delegations on non-octet boundaries. -- Daniel Bergstrom
                     83:     (noa@melody.se)
                     84: 
                     85:   - The longer MTR runs, the less meaningful the packet loss
                     86:     statistic. Or more meaningful, depending on your point of view.
                     87:     Perhaps MTR should use a circular buffer of some configurable
                     88:     number of results, and calculate the loss against that. -- Jacob Elder
                     89: 
                     90:   - It would be nice if the window size wasn't fixed. If I'm only 5
                     91:     hops from the host I'm monitoring, MTR wastes a lot of screen real
                     92:     estate. -- Jacob Elder
                     93: 
                     94:   - Colors in the curses version. -- Amix
                     95: 
                     96:   - If we run a mtr to monitor a connection it would be nice if the time at
                     97:     which mtr was started is print somewhere. -- Sebastian Ganschow
                     98: 
                     99: 
                    100: 
                    101: ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                    102: 
                    103: Things that shouldn't be on the TODO list because they're done. ;-)
                    104: 
                    105:   - Allow a toggle between hostname/IP number display. (for example a 
                    106:     click on the hostname could revert to ip number display in gtk version.
                    107:     curses: "n" key toggles hostnames/ipnumbers?)
                    108: 
                    109:   - Allow mtr to also send larger packets. 
                    110:        This will enable us to get a feel for the speed of the links
                    111:        we're traversing. (Van Jacobson was working on this His tool
                    112:        was slow, mtr will rock with this feature.... :-)
                    113:        (Anybody have the statistics experience to tell me how
                    114:        to do the data analysis?)
                    115:        -- DONE. Thanks to Olav Kvittem ...
                    116: 
                    117:   - The "don't probe all hosts at once" strategy can be improved a bit.
                    118:     It should not probe more than 10 unknown hosts, but the counter need
                    119:     not be reset at the start of the "round". This way if you probe
                    120:     slowly (relative to the RTT time to the end host), it can probe
                    121:     all hosts in the first "round". 
                    122:        -- DONE.
                    123: 
                    124:   - Read environment variable "MTR_DEFAULTS" as a commandline before
                    125:     parsing the commandline.  -- DONE. (ok it's MTR_OPTIONS.)
                    126: