Sorry to waste your time - I will stop using rsync

[jw schultz]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 06:29:33PM -0700, Trevor Marshall wrote:
> Jw,
> Respectfully,
> My experience is to shy away from any piece of software which the
> developers feel is inviolate
> 
> Although often the hardware and kernel certainly could be at fault it is
> wrong to assume they are, and such a response usually indicates that I am
> wasting my time reporting this problem.
> 

I'm sorry if i gave that impression.  Neither i nor anyone
else here feel that rsync is inviolate.  It does have plenty
of areas for improvement.

Rsync does little more than malloc, fork, exec, stat, read,
write, unlink and sometimes a little networking.  In other
words, basic I/O.  Unless you try to rsync /proc it doesn't
do anything that could be that dangerous.  A _really_ big
tree could cause OOM but few sites are likely to go there. 

What you have described is that in a string of system
crashes you have managed to get one incident where rsync has
reported an error without the system crashing. 

By definition the kernel is immune to application errors.
If you find an app that crashes the kernel you have found a
test case for a kernel bug.  If rsync is doing something
wrong that incidentally causes the kernel to bomb, OK we
want to fix it.  But let's isolate the problem.  If the
kernel is crashing we can't trust application behavior.