state of the rsync nation? (revisited 6/2003 from 11/2000)

[Brad Hards]

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On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:21 pm, Martin Pool wrote:
> I guess the reason why you're interested in doing it is so that you
> can browse public rsync mirrors from Konqueror/whatever?
Yep. Also, I was playing with the idea of rsync with Service Location Protocol 
to use as a replacement for the crappy practice of sharing data over floppy 
disks. The rough concept was that each machine had a shared directory, which 
you could conveiently label and advertise over SLP. 

> Speaking only for myself, I don't think this is worth spending time
> on.  It would be hard to write a wire-compatible library, and hard to
> refactor rsync into such a library.
I considered it, but not very long :)

> Not only might a new tool be written more easily without baggage, it
> might also (in a couple of years) persuade people running mirror sites
> to switch.  I know many of them are unhappy with rsync at the moment:
>
>  - large memory usage
>  - no really good ways to restrict client usage
>  - ...
Go superlifter! For what it is worth, the things I identified during the 
abortive kioslave / SLPv2 share development:
1. More secure than FTP.
2. Easy to label shares/directories and provide fine grained access control, 
if desired.
3. Client side library that doesn't require hellish text parsing, or at least 
hides it from you.
4. Well delimited packets, so you can tell when one has been dropped.

Brad
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