On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 05:33:46PM -0500, Alberto Accomazzi wrote:
...
> 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.
Well the easier syntax only motivates me 90% to personally take the time to
implement the option. If somebody can show a performance improvement that
will be enough to clinch it for me. My initial motivation for implementing
the optimization that was taken out in 2.4.0 was performance (which I
hadn't measured), and when Tridge took it out he asked me to show him a
performance gain to justify leaving it in I did some measurements then and
couldn't pursuade myself. All I'm asking is for somebody to put a little
effort into showing a modest performance difference.
- Dave