new rsync release needed soon?

[jw schultz]

On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 12:50:04AM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 31 Jul 2002, Dave Dykstra <dwd at bell-labs.com> wrote:
> 
> > Yes I think a new release is needed soon, but there's more patches than
> > that that should get in.  
> 
> We need to weigh up getting functions in vs making steps small enough
> that the chance of breakage is acceptable.  
> 
> I am afraid that at the moment our only means of getting really good
> cross-platform test coverage for rsync is to throw a release out, and
> so that inclines me towards being conservative in what we put in.
> Hopefully we can try to get people on the list testing -rc releases
> more aggressively.

Was an RC announced recently?  I don't recall seeing it
here.  For what it's worth (my usage isn't very varied) i'm
now running from friday's cvs + patches.

> > A bunch of them have been posted and I was hoping you were keeping
> > track of them and would be putting more of them in.
> 
> I will try to read back through the list and see about merging them
> this week, with a view to a release candidate on about the 11th, and a
> release about a week after that.
> 
> > The patch that I'd most like to see get in JD Paul's patch for using SSH
> > and daemon mode together.  We still don't have an agreement on what the
> > syntax should be.  I think the combination of -e ssh and :: which he
> > implemented is the most understandable syntax and we should just go with
> > it.
> 
> I agree that it would be really good to support it.  
> 
> However, -e and :: seem to be a persistent source of confusion for new
> users.  I'm not sure if this change will help those people, or what if
> anything would be better.  (More later on this.)

I concur on the confusion issue.  Never got it wrong myself 
but it took a little puzzling over.  Perhaps if the manpage
changed the terminology a bit so that instead of calling it an
rsync server we called it an rsync daemon it would reduce
the confusion of when :: is needed.  After all with --rsh
you are connecting to a server.

Another thing that may help would be to restructure USAGE
and GENERAL so that GENERAL became more of a TOC of USAGE and
we had USAGE subsections on
	"using locally" 
	"using without rsync daemon on server" 
	"using with rsync daemon on server"
	"using with rsync daemon over ssh transport"
	"running rsync daemon on server"
and fold the examples in.  Reading over it again just now i
get the impression that the manpage has suffered from the
documentation equivalent of code spagettification.

It might also help if either [user@]host::module or
rsync://[user@]host[:port]/module were deprecated and moved
to an errata section.  I know, this is a whole flame-fest
and i'm sorry but i think it needs to be said that the
extra two possible invocation syntaxes are making support
more difficult than it needs to be.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt