Steroids for Rsync!

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 04:11:52PM -0800, Scott Becker wrote:
> Can rsync be set up with: here's the src dir, here's the remote dir, now 
> here's a relative list of files I want you to sync? Perhaps being fed 
> one at a time via a pipe.

Rsync supports that, but not on an incremental basis -- i.e. it won't
start the transfer until EOF on the pipe.  A program designed to be more
incremental in its protocol would be needed to handle a steady stream of
update requests.

A while back, I wrote a test-bed for a new rsync protocol that I called
rZync (a bad name, but it was only for testing) that has such an
incremental protocol: it is possible to send it a steady stream of "put
this file here" messages, and it uses librsync to update the files.

Something like that, but quite a bit simpler could be written that makes
use of the librsync library and only supports the pushing of files from
one system to the other over the open connection.  It would need to
re-open the connection on failure, and spool the names of changed files
when the connection was down so that they could be sent when the
connection was up again.  It would be a pretty nice way to keep two
drives in sync, but I don't see it being a part of rsync itself.

..wayne..