Rsync'ing lists of files

[Stephane Paltani]

Hi Dave,

Dave Dykstra wrote:
> 
> Sigh, another request for the --files-from I promised to write over 6
> months ago, but I've been so overloaded at work lately that I don't know if
> I'm ever going to get to it.  Perhaps someone else will have to do it.

He he, happy to see a general consensus for this feature!

> It turns out that back in rsync 2.3.2 and earlier there was an optimization
> (which I wrote and actually was the primary reason that I volunteered to be
> maintainer of rsync for a while) that kicked in when there was list of
> includes with no wildcards followed by an --exclude '*', and there was no
> --delete.  Instead of recursing through the files and doing comparisons, it
> would just directly open the files in the include list.  It only had to be
> on the sending side, you might want to try 2.3.2 on your sending side to
> see if you get a significant performance boost.  Andrew Tridgell took it
> out in 2.4.0 because he didn't like how it changed the usual semantics of
> requiring all parent directories to be explicitly listed in the include
> list.

Whoops! That did the trick for me! It took me 6 minutes to transfer 250 GB!
Too bad it has been turned down. I have the impression it would satisfy
most, if not all, "--files-from" lobbyists.
 
> Your --delete-not-in-list suggestion has not been considered before, but
> something like that makes sense to me.

Would be really great.

Looking forward to version 2.5.6 ;-)

Thanks a lot,
Stephan