Hi, I'd like to suggest a new feature to rsync.
Problem: Currently, rsync generates a recursive list of file existing a the source directory, modifies this list by includes and excludes, and then copies these files. That's pretty good in most, but not all cases. I am mirroring a debian archive, but unfortunately, debian mixes all files of several distributions in a subtree /pool. There is no way to select only the files of a certain distribution through a simple exclude/include expression. There is a tool called debmirror, which first downloads the distribution index files, extracts all the filenames/paths of the files needed and then calls rsync for every single file. Thats certainly not useful, especially since rsync shows the servers motd for every single file. Therefore, I'd like to suggest a new option: Allow rsync to not build the list of files existing at the source directory by recursively walking through the source directory, but by reading a file or stdin to get a list of files to be copied. This would allow to mirror the distribution index files in a first step, then build the list of files needed and then to download these files is a second step. An alternative method would be to keep the recursive method, but to open a pipe to an external program. Before downloading a file, the path is printed to the pipe and an answer is read from the pipe. Thus, an external filter program can decide for each single file whether to copy it or not. regards Hadmut (Please respond directly, I'm not on your mailing list) -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
