Improving the rsync protocol (RE: Rsync dies)

Wayne Davison wayned at users.sourceforge.net
Fri May 17 14:33:01 EST 2002


On Fri, 17 May 2002, Wayne Davison wrote:
> so feel free to tell me exactly where I've missed the boat.

[Replying to myself...  hmmm...]

In my description of the _new_ protocol, my references to a generator
process are not really accurate.  The current generator process is
forked off after the initial file-list session figures out what files
need to be checked for differences, and it then churns out rolling
checksums for the sender process.  The "generator" in my previous
description is really just a receiver-side scanner process (that looks
for files that need to be check-summed).  So, either the new receiver
process would handle the checksum generation itself, or we'd need a 3rd
process on the receiver side to generate the checksum data (and it would
need a pipeline into the sender).

As a first step in investigating this further, I'm looking into librsync
to see if it might be easy to create a simple sender/receiver duo using
this library.  If anyone knows where some decent documentation on
librsync is, please let me know (I'm looking for it now, but the tar
doesn't appear to come with any decent docs).  I was wondering if 
librsync manages to implement the protocol without forking off a 
separate generator process...

..wayne..





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