Query on permissions

[Mark_H_Johnson at raytheon.com]

I have a question related to the use of -p (or -a which includes -p)
to set remote file / directory permissions.

I am using rsync along with System Imager to manage the "master image" of
a number of compute nodes in a cluster. I have more than one cluster,
so each head node has a copy of the "master image" (for the compute
nodes in its cluster). I want to make sure that all the master images
are identical [otherwise our software won't work...].

I am using a command like...
  rsync -av --delete compute cpc2:/opt1/systemimager/images/compute
Based on the documentation, I expect the all the files and directories
to be identical between the local copy and the remote one. What I find
is that permissions are not set if the file is not copied.

For example, on one system...
  ls -ld /opt1/systemimager/images/compute/root
  drwxr-x---    6 root     root         4096 May 27 10:17  .../root
and on the other system
  drwxr-xr-x    6 root     root         4096 May 27 10:17  .../root
but after the above command is run, the permissions are not changed.

This is with rsync --version
rsync  version 2.5.5  protocol version 26
Copyright (C) 1996-2002 by Andrew Tridgell and others
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, symlinks, batchfiles,
              IPv6, 64-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums

rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.

Is this the intended behavior of rsync or is there a bug here?

If this is the intended behavior, is there some way to do this [other
than removing the target directory and copying the whole pile across]?

Thanks.
--Mark H Johnson
  <mailto:Mark_H_Johnson at raytheon.com>