configure --with-rsh=CMD and default blocking-IO support

[Dave Dykstra]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 06:25:05PM -0800, Wayne Davison wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Martin Pool wrote:
> > A general-purpose RSYNC_OPTS variable would be more tasteful.  I think
> > popt makes supporting this fairly straightforward.
> 
> That's a nice idea.  One area we'll want to be careful of is how the two
> options interact.
> 
> For instance, we want to support old scripts that might set RSYNC_RSH
> and then run a bunch of rsync commands.  It would be nice to make this
> work without conflicting with a user's also-existing RSYNC_OPTS var.  A
> potential solution is to ignore RSYNC_OPTS if RSYNC_RSH is set (which
> also serves to wean people away from RSYNC_RSH if they want to be able
> to set other default options).
> 
> Another potential problem area is how to override already-set options.
> If someone wants to put -a into their RSYNC_OPTS variable, how can they
> then turn it off?  I suppose we could just say that the user gets what
> she deserves in such a case.
> 
> So, perhaps I'm trying to solve a problem that isn't really all that
> important.  Just having the ability to set the default remote shell and
> its IO mode might be good enough for most people, and we let the rest
> use shell scripts or aliases, like you said.
> 
> I could trim down my last patch to avoid the extra RSYNC_RSH parsing if
> you'd like to just apply the other part of it.  Or, feel free to tweak
> it yourself -- it should be pretty easy.


I think a general RSYNC_OPTS option would be difficult to support because
of all the options which don't make sense for every invocation.  Looking
over the list of options, setting the -e and corresponding blocking value
is just about the only option I can think people might always want.  People
can always make a wrapper script to add the options they want, and that
would lead to fewer surprises than if some unknowledgable user put
something into an RSYNC_OPTS variable and broke somebody else's script.  I
vote against RSYNC_OPTS.

- Dave Dykstra