partial-dir not being used?!

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 01:48 -0300, Carlos Carvalho wrote: 
> What's the purpose of --partial-dir then? I thought it was leaving the
> partial transfer as path/partial/filename instead of
> path/.filename.random. That's what it tried to do but this isn't fine
> if it needs another move. If rsync is killed with STOP or the machine
> crashes this partial will be lost? That doesn't look very useful.

It's fine and useful if rsync is killed with INT or TERM or hits a fatal
error (e.g., dropped connection).

I believe the reason why rsync doesn't create the file in the partial
dir from the start is that it may be using an old partial file as a
basis for a delta-transfer.  Rsync can't just append to the old partial
file because, in general, the beginning of the source file might have
changed since the old partial file was created. 

> How can we make rsync put the partial in path/partial/filename during
> the transfer?

I think the current behavior is reasonable.  You're always welcome to
modify your own copy of rsync.

-- 
Matt