symlink bug still not fixed

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 08:01:29PM -0700, Peter Sturdza wrote:
> I found and reported a bug about a year ago regarding
> symbolic links but haven't seen any mention of it
> since and it is still present in 2.6.1-pre2.
> 
> Just want to make sure it isn't forgotten.

Thanks for the reminder.  I hope to get some bug-reporting software
going before too long, but in the meantime, it is helpful when people
mention bugs that have fallen through the cracks.

> With the archive, update and backup options set, rsync will always
> replace the file with the symlink even when the file is newer

The way rsync currently works, it doesn't consider a file and a symlink
to be the same thing, so the -u option will not prevent a file from
being replaced by a symlink.  You can use the -L option to avoid this,
but that will cause all symlinks to be expanded into separate files.

> (and it will not save a backup either).

This is a bug.  There are a few places in the code that remove files
when the type of the file changes, and not all of them make a proper
backup of the replaced object.  I'll look into fixing this for the next
release (the one after 2.6.1).

Thanks for providing a simple test case -- that's always very useful.

..wayne..