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New inotifier (v4) finished, and a bunch of (small but cool) new features
I'm proud to announce the new inotifier rewrite (and its bunch of small enhancements), internally and lovely named "hopefully-this-one-will-work-as-expected" (private joke to me). It's shorter than previous version in terms of codelines, albeit more complex when dealing with special cases (large directories, multiple concurrent accesses to same files, re-born just-deleted files or dirs, etc). The new version is many times faster than all previous ones (including the external C-implemented gamin one). When you untar an archive, you can expect more or less the time of the untar process, after it finished, for complete ACLs application. Previously, it could take minutes to do the same (specifically when untarring the linux kernel in a shared dir). licornd is also very smart when talking about resources-consumption: it takes the CPU for ACLs intensive tasks (but only ONE CPU), and doesn't take it long. For what it has to do, I find it well balanced from the functionnality/resource point of view.
The new inotifier and related core.classes additions allow users homes to be watched now, and offer dedicated functionnalities to handle configuration files, and report *real* changes to them (not 'all access', generating a lot of false positives).
dnsmasq backend, privileges directly benefit from this new functionnalities. shadow configuration files watch is more robust and verifies everything when they reload (one could create inconsistencies, editing the files manually; this is taken in account).
There are still some rough edges and evil sub-sonic bugs (perhaps they are all the same, I can't hunt it down for now), but only on very-very heavily loaded systems, where users and groups pop in an out very fast. I will fix them in the next coding cycle.
Hopefully, you won't need the chk group command anymore. If you do, please provide a full trace:
export LTRACE=std licornd -rvD <whatever command in your other terminal>
In the new-but-small-but-cool features category, you'll find the command fuzzy matching:
get u get us get usr get users (and so one, with identical counterparts for add/mod/del/chk)
Will bring you the list of users. In the same kind:
get g -> groups get pro -> profiles get pri -> privileges get kw -> keywords
And so on. Everything is computed when you type it, there are no so-called "fixed values".
In the not-so-small-but-very-cool category, you will find that every part of Licorn® is now fully multi-lingual, on-the-fly: the daemon starts in the system lang, but every thread inside of it can switch to another language, and the client languages are pulled in from the web headers or the calling CLI environment. This makes everything dynamic, at will.
Documentation has been updated for permissions parts.
French tranlation is progressing notably: WMI part is finished, CLI is 90% done, and the rest is more or less 70% done (it doesn't matter anyway, as no user really sees it in real life).
I voluntarily don't mention the core object rewrite. It's very technical and doesn't bring new end-users functionalities, but guarantees that everything is cleaner and easier to extend inside licornd, regarding the users/groups/profiles/privileges/machines point of view.
I probably forgot many things here, but if I had written a book, you won't have read it anyway. Code and *use* the code is better. Many bugs have been fixed, and the code is generally more pythonic and lighter tht before: there are more generators, less hard-coded things, and abstractions (when necessary) got in the right places. At least, this how I wanted to implement them.
Enjoy,
Core-rewrite #1 + full-i18n, new inotifier work started
The past 2 weeks have featured a great core rewrite that I wanted to achieve for a long time. Core objects (Users, Groups & Profiles) are now clean objects, implemented with all the pythonic-fancyness that modern code can have (most notably properties, weak references and internal generators where applicable). Controllers manipulates them in a clean way too, doing things the CoreUnitObject can't do because they are not aware of the controller context (which make the whole thing totally logical, finally; things as they were meant to be, at last; [put your favorite self-satisfaction sentence here]).
Controllers and unit objects moderately use the daemon service facility, to make things more instant to clients and avoid long-activity stoppers: for example, setting permissive ON/OFF on groups launches a background check on shared data and returns instantly (among others).
As a consequence, the service facilities are initialized very early in the daemon (even before the LMC initializes) and are usable everywhere: Each individual object has a licord R/O property (named after this avoid collision with the Thread's daemon attribute), offering directly the {service,aclcheck,network}_* methods. The imports overhead and dirtiness of the previous implementation is totally avoided.
The patch lies in the development repository (not referenced in trac but accessible to SSHers). I will not push it to the stable branch until the new inotifier has landed, but it is very stable (testsuite has run many times on it).
The Full-i18n milestone will soon be closed (or nearly), because #2, #70, #541, #542 and #544 are implemented or closed in this patch. Thus, besides the full-object rewrite, we now have on-the-fly in-thread language transparent switching, and this really rocks for the WMI.
