In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Dave Dykstra writes:
> It is possible to build your own complete list of files to copy and give
> them all to rsync, by building a --include list and doing '--exclude *'
> at the end. Currently you need to also either have --include '*/' or
> explicitly list all parent directories above the files you want included
> or else the exclude '*' will exclude the whole directories. There's been
> talk of adding a --files-from option which would remove this last restriction,
> and I even offered to implement it, but I'm still waiting for anybody to
> give performance measurements (using rsync 2.3.2 which had an include
> optimization that did something similar if there were no wildcards) to show
> what the performance impact would be.
Dave,
I see you've now mentioned a few times what the performance impact of
this proposed patch would be, and I can't quite understand what you're
getting at. My suggestion of --files-from came from the obvious (at
least to me) realization that the current include/exclude mechanism is
confusing to many users, and had nothing to do with performance (at
least on my mind). I thought (and still think) that it would provide
a cleaner interface for performing fine-grained synchronization of
part of a filesystem, and as such was a desireable feature.
So while I understand the argument of not wanting to clobber rsync
with a lot of unnecessary features, I thought this one makes sense
regardless of performance or compatibility issues. In fact, I think
it makes sense to have it as a separate option as opposed to kludging
the equivalent functionality in the include/exclude syntax to avoid
the proliferation of confusing options and special cases.
Anyway, just wanted to make this point. As I have mentioned, I don't
personally *need* this option at the moment, but I think that if
enough people wanted to see it in rsync it should be implemented
regardless of what the change in performance may be.
-- Alberto
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Alberto Accomazzi mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
NASA Astrophysics Data System http://adsabs.harvard.edu
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics http://cfawww.harvard.edu
60 Garden Street, MS 83, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
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