Musing on: Detect renamed files and handle by renaming instead ofdelete/re-send

[Eli]

Andrew wrote:
> Is there some philosophical or practical reason why rsync 
> cannot use some persistent external database to map remote
> inodes to local inodes?

No idea if this is done or not, but couldn't inodes be recycled if a file is
deleted and the inode marked free?  Then the error of renaming might be done
- unless you mixed it with date/file size info too or something.  Also, do
*all* file system types use inodes in the same way?  And what about
filesystems remotely mapped in which maybe you don't have access to real
inode info?

Just brainstorming - I could be all wrong.

Eli.