On Sun, Dec 23, 2001 at 02:07:06AM -0800, Chris Cogdon wrote: > > Hi folks! > > I'm in desperate need of getting the '--force' option working. I've > written a jitterbug entry on this already #3500 > > Just curious to know if this is already being worked on, so I'm > not duplicating anyone's efforts if I was to try and work on this myself? > Or... will this be my first contribution to this fine program? :)
No one is working on it. In checking through my old email for the string "--force", I found a message from you in February 1999 where you were thinking --force would change the behavior of --delete which it doesn't. At that time I added a --delete-excluded option because of your case and several others; is that applicable for you here? Probably not. I'm not convinced that --force should delete in this case either, but if you come up with a patch I'll look at it closer and give my opinion on whether or not I think it should be accepted. I'm not the official maintainer anymore so it will be up to Martin to make the final decision. Back in that time frame I had discovered that --force did very little and I was thinking about taking it out but instead I changed the man page entry. It used to make more of a difference back before rsync did a depth-first search for deletes. I did find one case where it made a difference, but it's only when a file takes over a non-empty directory. - Dave Dykstra
