Windows and default --modify-window=0

Dave Dykstra dwd at drdykstra.us
Thu Jan 9 16:38:01 EST 2003


On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 01:02:29PM +0100, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> Uhm... rsync developers: what do you think about changing the default 
> modify-window in the Cygwin platform?
> It seems to me that many problems people have are just because of the 
> granularity of timestamp.
> Maybe changing the default could be the best choice. That would be 
> documented in the "man" and in my release announcement on 
> cygwni-annouce, of course.
> 
> Just an idea, maybe it's bad 0=)


As I understand it, --modify-window=2 is needed whenever you're copying
between a Windows filesystem (maybe only specific types, does anybody
know??) and a Unix filesystem.  Just because you're running on Cygwin,
that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing that although the risk of a
file modification time legitimately being off by a few seconds is pretty
low in the cases where it isn't really needed.  (Conversely, on Linux
you may be accessing a Windows filesystem directly but I realize you're
not talking about that situation).

The main problem is that if Cygwin always added the --modify-window=2
option to parameters it passes to the remote side it would fail if it were
talking to a release of rsync that is too old to recognize the option.
If it could be done on the cygwin side only, without passing the parameter
to the remote side, it might not be so bad.  I guess that would mean it
would work only when receiving files from a Unix system and not when
sending to them.  The surprise factor on that may be too much to make
it worthwhile.

- Dave



More information about the rsync mailing list