directories that change into symlinks

[David Garamond]

nope, --delete-after didn't seem to resolve the problem. what's needed 
is apparently for rsync to do an "rm -r oldname1" instead of "rmdir 
oldname1".

Eric Whiting wrote:
> I have observed this same problem.  Are you running --delete-after? I
> assumed it might be related to that option.
> eric
> 
> David Garamond wrote:
> 
>>our daily backup is done using the rdiff-backup tool, which in turn
>>utilizes rsync/librsync to do the actual mirroring work.
>>
>>a few days ago we did a refactoring and renamed a bunch of directories.
>>for backward compatibility we maintain the old names by symlinking it to
>>the new names. so, for example, oldname1/ now becomes newname1/, and
>>oldname1 is now a symlink to newname1/.
>>
>>we found that now the mirroring cannot complete. rsync doesn't seem to
>>be able to handle this. it tries to do an rmdir(oldname1) followed by
>>symlink(newname1,oldname1). however, since the directory oldname1/ in
>>the old mirror is not empty, rmdir fails with "Directory not empty" and
>>thus symlink fails too with "File exists" (since oldname1 has not been
>>deleted yet).
>>
>>any pointers? we looked at the available rsync options but have found no
>>clue yet.
>>
>>--
>>dave

-- 
dave