feature-wish: "--ignore-unrelated-errors" option

[David Madore]

Hi.

I looked high and low for the following feature of rsync but it does
not seem to be available, even though it would be really useful:
--ignore-unrelated-errors.  The semantics should be the following:
when an I/O error is encountered while reading a directory foo/ (as
far as I understand, rsync only takes into account errors on
directories, not on individual files), no deletion should be performed
below that point (in any subdirectories of foo/ or, at any rate,
within foo/ itself), but deletion may still be performed on totally
unrelated directories.

For example, if the source contains a directory foo/ which cannot be
read and a directory bar/ which is empty, and if the target contains
the same two directories with a file called blah in each of them, then
running rsync --delete --ignore-unrelated-errors should delete
bar/blah but not foo/blah.

Am I missing something or is this behavior indeed (highly desirable
and) impossible to get with the current rsync versions?  If so, I
should like to submit a feature wish on this count.

(I thought I could program it myself, but unfortunately the code seems
way to complicated for me, at least at this hour.)

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (david.madore at ens.fr,
     http://www.madore.org/~david/ )