Planning fixing '--force not working'

[Dave Dykstra]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2001 at 02:07:06AM -0800, Chris Cogdon wrote:
> 
> Hi folks!
> 
> I'm in desperate need of getting the '--force' option working. I've 
> written a jitterbug entry on this already #3500
> 
> Just curious to know if this is already being worked on, so I'm
> not duplicating anyone's efforts if I was to try and work on this myself?
> Or... will this be my first contribution to this fine program? :)


No one is working on it.  In checking through my old email for the string
"--force", I found a message from you in February 1999 where you were
thinking --force would change the behavior of --delete which it doesn't.
At that time I added a --delete-excluded option because of your case and
several others; is that applicable for you here?  Probably not.  I'm not
convinced that --force should delete in this case either, but if you come
up with a patch I'll look at it closer and give my opinion on whether or
not I think it should be accepted.  I'm not the official maintainer anymore
so it will be up to Martin to make the final decision.

Back in that time frame I had discovered that --force did very little and I
was thinking about taking it out but instead I changed the man page entry.
It used to make more of a difference back before rsync did a depth-first
search for deletes.  I did find one case where it made a difference, but
it's only when a file takes over a non-empty directory.

- Dave Dykstra