Sunday, August 16, 2009

Squid-3 isn't a rewrite!

G'day,

There seems to be this strange misconception that Squid-3 is a "rewrite" of Squid in C++. I am not sure where this particular little tidbit gets copy/pasted from but just for the record:

Squid-3 is the continuation of Squid-2.5, made to compile using the GNU C++ compiler. It is not a rewrite.

If Squid-3 -were- a rewrite, and the resultant code -was- as much of a crappy-performing, bastardised C/C++ hybrid, then I'd have suggested the C++ coders in question need to relearn C++. Luckily for them, the codebase is a hybrid of C and C++ because it did just start as a C codebase with bits and pieces part-migrated to C++.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Preparation for next release; IPv6 checklist

I've been slowly working on tidying up the codebase before the next snapshot release. I've been avoiding doing further large scale code reorganisation until I'm confident that this codebase is as stable and performs as well as it should.

I'll hopefully have the next stable snapshot online tonight. I'll then re-evaluate where things are at right now and come up with a short-list of things to do over the next couple of weeks. It'll almost certainly be the remainder of the IPv6 preparation work - I'd like to prepare the last few bits of infrastructure for IPv6 - and make certain that is all stable before I start converting the client-side and server-side code to actively using the IPv6 routines.

The current IPv6 shortlist, if I decide to do it:
  1. client database code - convert to a radix tree instead of a hash on the IP address; make IPv4/IPv6 agnostic.
  2. persistent connection code - up the pconn hash key length to fit the text version of the IPv6 address. I'll worry about migrating the pconn code to a tree later on.
  3. Importing the last remaining bits of the IPv6 related code into the internal DNS code.
  4. Make sure the internal and external DNS choices both function properly when handling IPv6 addresses for forward and reverse lookups.
  5. Import the IP protocol ACL type and IPv6 address ACL types - src6 and dst6.
  6. Modify the ACL framework to use the IPv6 datatype instead of "sockaddr_in" and "inaddr" structs; then enable src6/dst6.
  7. Make certain the source and destination hostname ACLs function correctly for both IPv4 and IPv6.
  8. Test, test, test!
The last time I did a "hack" conversion to support IPv6 client side code I found a number of places which expected a newly-allocated struct to be zero'ed, and thus the "in_addr" embedded inside it to be INADDR_ANY. This caused some crashes to occur in production testing. I'm thus going to hold off on pushing through the IPv6 client side changes (which are actually surprisingly simple once the above is done!) until I've enumerated and fixed all of those particular nightmares.

The IPv6 server-side stuff is a whole different barrel of fun. I'm going to ignore a lot of that for now until I've made certain the client-side code is stable and performing as well as the current IPv4-only code.

I don't even want to think about the FTP related changes that need to occur. I may leave the FTP support IPv4 only until someone asks (nicely) about it. The FTP code is rife with C string pointer manipulations which need to be rewritten to use the provided string primitives. I'd really like to do -that- before I consider upgrading it to handle IPv6.

Anyway. Lots to do, not enough spare time to do it all in.