Feature req: multiple source trees

[Dave Dykstra]

How is that different from the behavior now when multiple source 
directories are given?  The rsync Usage says:

    Usage: rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... [USER@]HOST:DEST
      or   rsync [OPTION]... [USER@]HOST:SRC DEST
      or   rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... DEST
      or   rsync [OPTION]... [USER@]HOST::SRC [DEST]
      or   rsync [OPTION]... SRC [SRC]... [USER@]HOST::DEST
      or   rsync [OPTION]... rsync://[USER@]HOST[:PORT]/SRC [DEST]
    SRC on single-colon remote HOST will be expanded by remote shell
    SRC on server remote HOST may contain shell wildcards or multiple
      sources separated by space as long as they have same top-level

Multiple sources can be specified in all cases.

- Dave Dykstra


On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 11:19:01AM +0200, Ph. Marek wrote:
> 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
> 
>