Rumor Portability
Motivations
Rumor is the file replication package that we have developed as part of the
Travler research project. Although
the original Rumor architecture was portable, the original implementation was
tied to Unix.
While investigating porting Rumor to other platforms we considered
a fundamental question: Is it feasible to make a file replication package
file system independent? This question was the driving force behind
the Rumor portability research.
Towards Portability
To examine the portability of the Rumor package we investigated the
requirements that Rumor has on the underlying file system. Through the
course of this investigation we discovered that the implementation
of the necessary Rumor functionality on the candidate platforms would
be quite different from the original Unix implementation. That made
it apparent that recoding Rumor for each file system would be inefficient.
Also, software engineering principles tell us that maintaining different
code bases is difficult.
So it was our goal to isolate Rumor's file system dependent code into
specific modules. In order to achieve this goal, we created an
object oriented architecture for platform independence
Architecture for Platform Independence
The architecture that we created for platform independence supports
isolation of the file system dependent code into separate modules. The
goal of the architecture was to increase efficiency in porting the
Rumor system to other platforms. Support for different file systems
can be added without changing the majority of the code.
Also, since the file system independent Rumor code will be common on
each implementation, it will be easier to support multiple platforms
simultaneously.
Implementation Status
Rumor has been reorganized with respect to the new architecture for
platform independence.
Please contact the developers
if you have any questions or comments about the Rumor portability research.
Last modified: Tue Mar 3 09:50:32 PST 1998