a question concerning --partial

[Matt McCutchen]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 20:54 +0100, Cezary Sliwa wrote:
> Is it true that when --partial is specified and a partial download is
> present, the contents of the file itself are not used to speed up the
> download? i.e. only the content of the file in the partial dir is used when
> the download is resumed and the rest is simply downloaded?

Yes, that is true.

Do note that the receiver only leaves a partial file if it has gotten at
least some literal data (search for "cleanup_got_literal"), but
depending on the amount of literal vs. not-yet-matched data, the
destination file may still be a better basis.  It would be possible to
enhance rsync to use *both* the destination file and the partial file as
bases; the generator could do this transparently to the sender by
treating the destination file and partial file as one long file.

Matt