specifying a list of files to transfer

Andrew J. Schorr aschorr at telemetry-investments.com
Fri Jan 17 16:52:00 EST 2003


On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 05:07:13PM -0800, Wayne Davison wrote:
> (I assume you're talking about when using -R, which is not currently on
> by default.)  I believe that we do need an auto-creation mode and also a
> way to optimize the transfer to avoid this (since it results in a lot of
> extra directory checks that can slow things down when we know that they
> aren't needed).  Which one is the default is the current question.  I'm
> currently leaning toward going back to sending the implied dirs by
> default, and having an option for people to optimize the transfer (which
> would allow it to be used with the normal -R mode even when --from-files
> was not used).

This is why my patch included the --no-implicit-dirs and --send-dirs
options.  These allow you to specify precisely what you want without
having to remember which behavior is implied by various other options...

Although I suppose that those two options could be combined.  The basic
idea is that if the user is taking the responsibility for specifying
the directories himself (--send-dirs), then rsync doesn't need to
worry about automatically sending all the parent directories
(--no-implicit-dirs).

So perhaps an --explicit-dirs option (combining the two meanings) could
be used to indicate that the user is taking all responsibility for
sending directories and rsync doesn't need to worry about it.  And
to be safe, a --no-explicit-dirs to turn off this behavior.

-Andy



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