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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.


Rumor icon

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