Patch to not modify files in place unless "--inplace" option specified

[Wayne Davison]

On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 06:25:36PM -0700, Carl E. Thompson wrote:
> This patch causes rsync to honor the absence of the "--inplace" option
> for permission, owner and group changes.

Unfortunately, that's not what the --inplace option is for.  Its purpose
is to control how data updates occur, not attribute updates.  If I make
rsync break hard-links to make attribute updates, it will need to be a
new option, as is done in Matt's patch. 

The problems you list with the --link-dest option only affect a client
that contacts the server to do a backup.  If you instead have your
backup server contact the client machines, things are much safer.  You
can still use an rsync daemon (one per client) for the transfers, if you
like.

There was a suggest to rsync allow a daemon to be configured with a
link-dest option in the config file.  That also solves some of the
problems, but would also require that the daemon use a pre-transfer
script to move any old content out of the way for the current copy
(since it is intended that a --link-dest copy goes into an empty
hierarchy).  e.g. it could manage a symlink for the current and prior
dir and have the daemon config file used the symlink names to get to
the right directories.

..wayne..