filelist calculation algoritm

Wayne Davison wayned at users.sourceforge.net
Sun Jan 5 20:45:01 EST 2003


On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 11:55:22AM -0800, jw schultz wrote:
> The first problem is this would flatten things unless you used
> relative and forced the user's CWD.  That would cause considerable
> confusion.

Really?  This is exactly how rsync works now with multiple file names on
the command-line, so I don't see this as being any more confusing than
what we already have.  The rule would be you can specify the files on
the command-line or on stdin (if you use '-' as the only source file).
Since all names are treated in the same way regardless of where they
were specified, everything works the same as it did before, only more
names are now supported per invocation.  I'm thinking that this way is
more flexible since it allows someone to flatten things if that's what
they really want to do.

> Secondly, how would you do it when the source location is remote?
> Many of the users asking for this are doing pulls.

I mentioned a protocol change that would send the extra file names to
the other side after rsync starts up.  Currently the send_files()
routine always sends names from the sending side to the receiving side.
The new protocol would change that to always send names from the user
side to the server side when this option was specified.  The user's
command would look like this:

    rsync -avR remote:- /foo/bar

The file list would be read from the local (user) side, of course.  The
remote command being run by rsync would look like this:

    ssh remote rsync --server --sender -vlogDtprR . -

The presence of the '-' as the source would tell us to slurp names
instead of send them.

Since the file list is exchanged in total before we do any real work, I
think this change would actually be really easy to implement.

..wayne..



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