Debian upgrade and rsync changes.

[Wayne Davison]

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:57:44PM +0800, Mike Daws wrote:
> The man page shows new --delete options - particularly reference is made
> to --delete-during being more efficient than --delete. Is this likely to
> be a desirable parameter change for us?

Yes, I recommend --delete-during for those that don't need --delete-after
functionality.  It gets more and more efficient the larger the file-set
gets (since larger file-sets can't fit in the OS's directory cache, and
--delete-during eliminates a separate pass through the hierarchy).

> There seems to have been a lot of activity around the include/exclude
> type features. However, as far as I can see the basic functionality does
> not appear to have changed.

Yes, that is right.  The only user-visible changes in some obscure patterns
(which were fixed to work correctly) are listed at the head of the bug-fix
list in the changes for 2.6.0.  If any of your patters are affected by the
changes (which is unlikely), there is provided a correct way to phrase the
pattern that works in all versions of rsync.

Most of the improvements to the including and excluding of files (such as
the ability to separate an exclude's hiding of files on the sender from
its protecting of files on the receiver) were added as a separate option,
--filter, in order to make rsync as backward-compatible as possible.

You may want to also check into the --partial-dir option, which is a safer
means of providing --partial functionality because it does not ever over-
write a destination file with a partial (or corrupt) transfer.

..wayne..