rsync of symbolic links bug

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 09:44:10AM -0600, Tom Schmidt wrote:
> The fix for this would be to have rsync internally sort its filelist
> to push the updated files and directories first, then the updated
> symbolic links last.

Yes, that's one possible solution.  However, changing the sort order
would add an incompatibility with older versions, so I'm wondering if a
different change wouldn't be better.  I think it would be possible to
change the loop in the generate_files() function to exclude symlinks,
and then loop over the list again to process them all last.  Since the
sender doesn't care if the list is processed in order, I think that this
would allow an updated receiving side to interoperate with older sending
side and still benefit from the revised fetch order.

The downside would be that if rsync is processing a really large file
list, it may run noticably slower if it has to traverse the list twice
instead of once.  So, it would be good to measure this and see what kind
of a performance hit we're talking about.

..wayne..