--relative, --dirs and --delete without --recursive

[Carlos Carvalho]

The manual says that without --recursive directories are (noisily)
skiped. However with --relative intermediate directories are created.
So what happens if you give only -R? Is -d the default? And what
happens when you give -R --no-dirs? I tried and it seems that
intermediate dirs are considered anyway, so it looks like -R overrides
--no-dirs. Is it true? Does it depend on the order of options?

On a related matter, I'm not clear on the behavior of --delete with -d
but without -r. The manual says "deletions will also occur when --dirs
(-d) is enabled, but only for directories whose contents are being
copied." However without -r the contents are not copied, only the
directories themselves, right? That seems to be the difference between
-r and -d. I'd expect this means deletion won't happen, and in some
tests files were in fact not removed. Therefore where does the change
in 2.6.7 mentioned in the manual has an effect?