hardlink bug in 2.6.4?

[Erik Jan Tromp]

The background:

I host one of the unofficial slackware mirrors & push to a high speed (unlisted) mirror that several other unofficials use for pulls. To save time/disk/bandwidth I use a custom script to hardlink the trees prior to pushing the updates to said unlisted mirror.

The commandline (linewrap from hell, sorry):
(note: username/password/hostname/modulename deliberately obfuscated)

export RSYNC_PASSWORD="password"

rsync --archive --compress --hard-links --partial --progress --sparse --verbose --delete-after --include /.pending --include /slackware-8.1 --include /slackware-9.0 --include /slackware-9.1 --include /slackware-10.0 --include /slackware-10.1 --include /slackware-current --exclude ".*.??????" --exclude "/*" /pub/mirrors/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/ rsync://username@hostname/modulename/

The errors (more linewrap hell):

rsync: link "/slackware-10.1/patches/source/cvs/slack-desc" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/cvs/slack-desc failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-10.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-8.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-9.0/patches/source/python/slack-desc" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-9.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-10.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc.python-demo" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc.python-demo failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-9.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc.python-demo" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc.python-demo failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-10.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc.python-tools" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc.python-tools failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync: link "/slackware-9.1/patches/source/python/slack-desc.python-tools" (in modulename) => slackware-10.0/source/d/python/slack-desc.python-tools failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(789)

Observations & misc info:

In all, 26 unique files (going by inodes) were hardlinked by my custom script prior to the push. The above represents exactly 4 of them. Curious that the other 22 didn't generate errors during the push.

There appears to be no rhyme nor reason to single these files out. They're neither the most linked nor the least, not the largest nor the smallest. Nothing particularly unique about their permissions, paths, whatever.. just day-to-day mirror update stuff.

I've been using the above-quoted commandline, with obvious '--include' changes as time goes by, for the last several years. The only other time I saw this error was while pushing the previous slackware update (2005-apr-05), but assumed it was a burp caused by something I had done so didn't report it.

$ rsync --version
rsync  version 2.6.4  protocol version 29
Copyright (C) 1996-2005 by Andrew Tridgell and others
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, symlinks, batchfiles, 
              inplace, IPv6, 64-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums

This version known to be in use at both ends since 2005-mar-31.

Shameless plug:

http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/slackware-mirrors.shtml

Erik

-- 
"I really want a license to do just two things: make the code available
to others, and make sure that improvements stay that way. That's really
it. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything else is fluff."
 -- Linus Torvalds