Will rsync support btrfs file system?

[Martin Schwenke]

>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Marcus <CMarcus at Media-Brokers.com> writes:

    Charles> On 12/6/2009, Louise Hoffman (louise.hoffman at gmail.com) wrote:

    >> The way I read that, it's not something rsync-specific. It sounds
    >> like btrfs would allow the generation of a list of files, which rsync
    >> (or tar, or zip, or whatever) could accept. (Rsync obviously being
    >> the best choice, :-) )

    Charles> So, I wonder if inotify could be leveraged to do the same
    Charles> thing - this would be file-system agnostic...

What rsync really needs is for this option:

            --files-from=FILE       read list of source-file names from FILE

to launch another process that continues to read FILE and update the
(internal) file list until it hits end-of-file.  Then FILE could be a
named pipe or similar.  That would work with inotify (via inotifywait
or similar) in a trivial way.

At the moment --file-from just expects a plain file and reads as much
as possible at startup.  Last time I tested this with a pipe it
"worked" to some extent - I think it blocked until the writer closed
the pipe and then it copied the files whose names had been pushed into
the pipe.

I posted to the list on this topic about 6 months ago but nobody
seemed interested.  If I ever get any "copious spare time" I'll look
into implementing this myself...  but I don't think that will be soon.
:-(

peace & happiness,
martin