A small addition to the manpage and "clone mode" suggestion

[Peter]

Dear developers,

In the rsync's manpage, there is a line describing the "archive mode"
option:

-a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)

Archive mode means that all data is backed up sensibly while the same
doesn't apply for all metadata (hence the mentioned -H, -A and -X options).
There is another similar "special file system option" as -H, -A and -X are,
and that is the -S option for handling sparse files.

While the negated options in the brackets are not strictly required to be
mentioned here in the manpage, they provide an useful information to the
user who actually wants to perform as synced copy as possible, meaning
including all of the special file properties (for example while trying to
migrate to another filesystem). I simply propose that the -S option is to
be added for the line to read:

-a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X,-S)


And my second suggestion is an appeal to discuss a possibility of adding
something such as "clone mode", which is actually the archive mode plus the
family of special file properties, so: "rsync -aHAXS ..." rsync's name
itself implies that it is capable of doing any file sync so why wouldn't
there be such option?


Please don't take the report as too picky. It can only be a good thing that
rsync is so mature piece of software that we can discuss such minor issues.
And thank you for all the great work!

Best regards,
Peter
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/attachments/20170702/bdff6731/attachment.html>