On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 05:25:42PM -0500, Alberto Accomazzi wrote:
> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Bennett Todd writes:
>
> > Even nicer, in my opinion, would be a mode where rsync could be told
> > to take a src dir and a dst dir as cmdline args, then simply reads
> > paths from stdin, and as each path is read, sync from that src file
> > under the src dir to the corresponding dst file under the dst dir;
> > repeat until eof on stdin. That'd make it easy for a process that
> > periodically modifies one or another file in a potentially large
> > tree, to simply send notifications to a persistent rsyncer that
> > takes care of efficiently replicating those changes over to the
> > other side.
>
>
> I second that, although I haven't had the real need to have such an
> interface to rsync so far. After reading the slew of messages on this
> mailing list from people confused about --include and --exclude it's
> clear to me that it would make sense to have the option to just give
> rsync a list of files (or directories) to transfer. If I were to do
> this I would probably implement it as it's in gnu tar:
>
> rsync --files-from=FILE
I like that idea. I would call it "--only-from". It could be implemented
almost exactly like my old optimization (which doesn't change the rsync
protocol) and it wouldn't change the semantics of include and exclude.
I expect Andrew wouldn't have any objection to that (tell me if I'm wrong,
Andrew).
The different semantics (of not having to include the parent directories
in the list) is almost enough reason by itself to have this option, but
I would like to also see some evidence that it makes a difference in
performance before I develop the code. August, would you be willing to
measure the difference in elapsed & cpu time to copy your 800 or so files
via an include-from/exclude '*' with an rsync 2.3.2 client with and without
the optimization? To turn off the optimization, all you need to do is add
a wildcard to one of the paths (making sure that it doesn't pull in any
additional files of course). When the optimization is off, you will need
to include all parent directories of course. The server side doesn't need
to be rsync 2.3.2, it can be any version.
> where FILE could be "-" to mean STDIN.
Why not. And it would be easy to add that capability to --include-from and
--exclude-from at the same time.
- Dave
