rsync memory usage, paid feature request

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 01:13:23AM -0500, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
> Unfortunately there's no indication of who needs a spare week of
> coding time, or how much a week would cost. 

That's a really old comment, so I'm not sure if it was written by Martin
Pool or Dave Dykstra or someone else.  I'm also fairly sure that a week
of time would not suffice to solve this problem in rsync, but you may
wish to try to contact one of those guys and see if they wrote the
comment in question and what they were thinking of as a solution.

Quite a while back I looked into the changes necessary to have rsync
perform a more incremental update of a hierarchy of files, and they
required very extensive changes to the protocol.  I coded up a test-bed
application which I jokingly named rZync.  This program got to the stage
of being able to transfer and update hierarchies of files, but I never
took it to the next stage of re-examining the design and coding up a
next-gen version of rsync.  (The test-bed doesn't have enough features
to be a full replacement of rsync for most people, since options like
--delete and --hard-links aren't implemented.)  Working on this is
actually something that I'd like to revisit in the near future.  If you
had any interest in helping to fund this, please get in touch with me.

..wayne..