todo: Document thoughts on visiting files.

diff --git a/TODO b/TODO
index a60f539..7b217c4 100644 (file)
--- a/TODO
+++ b/TODO
@@ -457,3 +457,43 @@ right range of data so that integration would be possible.  The
 standards for CMDBs come from the DMTF, see eg:
 
 http://dmtf.org/news/pr/2009/7/dmtf-releases-cmdbf-standard-federating-configuration-management-data
+
+Efficient way to visit all files
+--------------------------------
+
+https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/tip-audit-virtual-machine-for-setuid-files/#content
+
+A naive method would look like:
+
+  g#visit ~return_stats:true "/" (
+    fun pathname stat ->
+      ...
+  )
+
+However this has two disadvantages:
+
+ - requires hand-written custom bindings in each language
+ - unclear about locking, thread-safety and re-entrancy of handle g
+
+A better way would be to have some sort of explicit "download all
+filenames and stat structures", which could then be iterated over:
+
+  let files = g#find_opts ~return_stats:true "/" in
+  List.iter (
+    fun pathname stat ->
+      ...
+  )
+
+The problem with this is that 'files' is going to be larger than a
+protocol buffer.
+
+This leads to thinking about changes to the protocol / generator to
+make this simpler.  The proposal would be to add RBigStringList,
+RBigStructList [or RBig (Ranytype ...)].  These would work like
+FileOut, in that they would use file streaming to stream XDR
+structures (probably written to a file on the library side).
+Generated code would hide most of the implementation.
+
+We also need to think about security issues: is it possible for the
+daemon to keep sending back data forever, and if so what happens on
+the library side.