rsync on osx hack

[Victor Shoup]

There have been many problems reported with rsync on OSX: the unpatched
version does not preserve extended attributes, and Apple's patched  
version is
buggy, and also does not allow one to backup from OSX to a non-OSX Unix.

I have been interested in a fast and reliable way to backup my files  
from OSX
to a non-OSX file server.   There are some patched versions of rsync  
on the web
that claim to do this, but I have no idea how reliable they are.

Right now, what I do is keep my files that I wish to back up on OSX  
on a UFS
partition, which exposes xattr's at ._AppleDouble files.   This makes  
it trivial
to backup using rsync.  However, UFS  is apparently being deprecated  
in the near
future on OSX, so more as an experiment, I developed a few lines of C  
code
that do what I want, using an HFS+ formatted partition.
The idea and the code are fairly simple, so it should bee very simple  
to debug and maintain.

If you are interested in the details, see

    http://www.shoup.net/apple_double/README

and if you want to download the source, go to

   http://www.shoup.net/apple_double/apple_double.tar

As I said, right now, it is an experiment.
It needs more testing.
Any feedback is appreciated.

   -- Victor Shoup