Rewritten rsync man page

Tony Abernethy tony at servacorp.com
Tue Aug 7 07:49:11 GMT 2007


Wayne Davison wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 07:26:19PM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > What do you all think so far?  Am I going in the right direction?
> 
> I'll hopefully have some time to check into it more later on, 
> but I did give your pages a look and they look pretty good.  
> One thing I had been trying to do was to keep the option 
> section from wrapping on an 80- column screen (which is why 
> none of the lines were longer than 72 characters).  What do 
> you think?  Is that constraint needed these days?
> (I've used 128 columns for quite a while...)
> 
> I didn't get a chance to delve into the content and 
> categorizations yet, but if anyone has taken a read and has a 
> reaction, it would be nice to hear what folks think.
> 
> ..wayne..

Reaction.  I did a fast look-at initially --- I LIKE!

Critical information -- and extremely hard to convey:
Design level.  What is in scope and what is outside.
If I want to copy stuff from one place to another,
where is the boundary between what works and what doesn't? 
Good metrics do not exist.

Generally, you document what you can do.
I suspect that rsync may be good and flexible enough that it is
 productive to document what is outside the scope of what rsync does.
When things get complicated, WHY becomes very useful to know.

Very short description of rsync
When cp (or scp) CANNOT do what you want/need.

A one-paragraph "cheat sheet" if possible would at least be interesting.

Lines that fit on an 80-column display
Fair-weather friend
Foul-weather friend
128-column is almost always useable, BUT
Staying within the 80 column or so limit advertises that you intend to stay
usable under duress.



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