a problem I'm having with rsync-4.5.4

[Dave Dykstra]

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 06:11:47PM -0700, Wayne Davison wrote:
> On Tue, 7 May 2002, Wayne Davison wrote:
> > I think this statement in the man page is actually false:
> > 
> >   if the pattern starts with a / then it is matched against the start of
> >   the filename, otherwise it is matched against the end of the filename.
> 
> Of course, immediately after I send this, I discover that the
> non-wildcard-matching code is, in fact, trying to do this that way.

And in fact I think the non-wildcard-matching code actually succeeds,
doesn't it?

> Looks like my previous man-page tweak is not correct.  Sorry -- I'll try
> to work up something better (like fixing the fnmatch() code).

I doubt it's worth trying to fix the fnmatch() code, because fnmatch is a
standard function and it would be a lot of work to maintain our own
modified version.  I think it would be better to adjust the man page to
describe how it works.  I think the include/exclude pattern scheme in rsync
is too inadequate to merit doing a lot of work on fixing bugs in it; a
complete rewrite with a more powerful syntax could be worthwhile, but I
don't think fixing this bug would really be that much of an improvement.

The --files-from option I keep promising (but never can find the time to
implement) would help because people can use their own file pattern
generation, although it isn't a complete answer because it won't help with
selecting which files on the receiving side should be deleted or not
deleted.

- Dave Dykstra