question about 2.6.3pre2's --link-by-hash behaviour

[Erik Jan Tromp]

I had noticed the --link-by-hash patch a short while back & decided it was time to experiment with it. Sadly, its behaviour is considerabely different from what I expected - to the point that I find it unusable in its current form. I had hoped to use it both for my rotating backups & for my (unofficial) slackware mirror.

For the test itself, I did the following:
- created 3 directories in /tmp/: src/ dst/ hash/
- put a random small file in src/, then made 3 non-hardlinked copies which differ by date, owner & group, last modified date.
- gained root, issued the following command:

[root at lithium ~]# /home/erik/pkg/pre/usr/bin/rsync -aPv --link-by-hash=/tmp/hash /tmp/src/ /tmp/dst/

The result:

[erik at lithium ~]$ ls -l /tmp/src/
total 16
-rw-r--r--  1 erik   users   395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig
-rwxrwxrwx  1 erik   users   395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig+mode*
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody nogroup 395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig+owner.group
-rw-r--r--  1 erik   users   395 2004-09-22 04:25 orig+time

[erik at lithium ~]$ ls -l /tmp/dst/
total 16
-rw-r--r--  5 erik users 395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig
-rw-r--r--  5 erik users 395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig+mode
-rw-r--r--  5 erik users 395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig+owner.group
-rw-r--r--  5 erik users 395 2004-09-14 17:07 orig+time

(The 5th link being the hash file itself)

My question is simple enough. Are there plans to make --link-by-hash pay attention to file externals?

Erik

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