Feature req: multiple source trees

[Ph. Marek]

Hi everybody,

I want to share a feature request I wrote here some time ago.


I'd like to give rsync more than 1 source-tree, where the "sum" (as
described below) is rsync'd to the destination.

suppose I have some machines, which have almost the same configuration,
different only in small details.
Then I want to rsync all machines from a master, with the details as
specific to every machine.

I propose the following mechanism:

- the commandline is parsed as now, but instead of a single source name an
array of source names is saved.
- on reading the source directories the first ("master") directory is read
(as now).
- then the rest of the source directories is read, and every file there
which is already in memory is discarded. So only additional files are added
to memory. and ->basedir now points to the correct source directory.

so given this example

BASE/
	a
	b
	c
1/
	d
	e
2/	
	d
	e

if I run rsync BASE --source 1 machine1:destination
the trees BASE and 1 are taken and rsync'd to machine1.


Another simple extension to this is to give a list of filenames (or a file
with a list of filenames) as parameter, and every file in this list is not
substituted but APPENDED.
So I could have a base /etc/passwd and another with the user accounts in
the different version directories and have them pushed together to the
other machine! Here a bitfield saying in which trees the file is present
would be good.


If no-one else starts working on that I'll do my worst - but it can take
some time.


Comments, please???


Regards,

Phil