Using rsync to generate diff/patches

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:57:21AM -0600, Dave Whitinger wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 11:50 AM, Chris Shoemaker wrote:
> 
> > Look at "batch mode."  Except it actually applys changes, too.
> 
> Thank you, Chris!
> 
> That's excellent that most of the code is already written.  All
> that is needed now is something like "dry-run", that will tell it
> not to apply the changes, but only write out the batch file.
> 
> Something like this:
> 
> rsync --write-batch=foo --dry-run -a host:/source/dir/ /adest/dir/

You probably noticed that --write-batch can't currently be used with
--dry-run.  I've considered that this would be useful functionality
for while now.  

> 
> Doable?

It's doable, but not trivial.  It involves a more "complete" dry-run
implementation.  It's probably a nice project for someone getting into
hacking on rsync.  If I had more time for rsync hacking, this is
probably the functionality I'd most like to add.

-chris