rsync - Jul 2017 - A small addition to the manpage and "clone mode" suggestion

Dear developers,

In the rsync's manpage, there is a line describing the "archive
mode"
option:

-a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)

Archive mode means that all data is backed up sensibly while the same
doesn't apply for all metadata (hence the mentioned -H, -A and -X options).
There is another similar "special file system option" as -H, -A and -X
are,
and that is the -S option for handling sparse files.

While the negated options in the brackets are not strictly required to be
mentioned here in the manpage, they provide an useful information to the
user who actually wants to perform as synced copy as possible, meaning
including all of the special file properties (for example while trying to
migrate to another filesystem). I simply propose that the -S option is to
be added for the line to read:

-a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X,-S)


And my second suggestion is an appeal to discuss a possibility of adding
something such as "clone mode", which is actually the archive mode
plus the
family of special file properties, so: "rsync -aHAXS ..." rsync's
name
itself implies that it is capable of doing any file sync so why wouldn't
there be such option?


Please don't take the report as too picky. It can only be a good thing that
rsync is so mature piece of software that we can discuss such minor issues.
And thank you for all the great work!

Best regards,
Peter
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Note that --sparse does not guarantee that the files will be the same
size.  Just that they will be as sparse as rsync can make them
regardless of how/if the source file is sparse.

OTOH, I would suggest lengthening that line even more by showing the
long options.  Most of those options have very obvious meanings if you
read the long option but if you don't remember one of the letters you
have to go looking it up.  To make matters worse it is much harder to
search for (for example) -t instead of --times.  This is why whenever I
am not at the command line I almost always use long options.

On 07/02/2017 03:23 PM, Peter via rsync wrote:
> Dear developers,
> 
> In the rsync's manpage, there is a line describing the "archive
mode"
> option:
> 
> -a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X)
> 
> Archive mode means that all data is backed up sensibly while the same
> doesn't apply for all metadata (hence the mentioned -H, -A and -X
> options). There is another similar "special file system option"
as -H,
> -A and -X are, and that is the -S option for handling sparse files.
> 
> While the negated options in the brackets are not strictly required to
> be mentioned here in the manpage, they provide an useful information to
> the user who actually wants to perform as synced copy as possible,
> meaning including all of the special file properties (for example while
> trying to migrate to another filesystem). I simply propose that the -S
> option is to be added for the line to read:
> 
> -a, --archive               archive mode; equals -rlptgoD (no -H,-A,-X,-S)
> 
> 
> And my second suggestion is an appeal to discuss a possibility of adding
> something such as "clone mode", which is actually the archive
mode plus
> the family of special file properties, so: "rsync -aHAXS ..."
rsync's
> name itself implies that it is capable of doing any file sync so why
> wouldn't there be such option?
> 
> 
> Please don't take the report as too picky. It can only be a good thing
> that rsync is so mature piece of software that we can discuss such minor
> issues. And thank you for all the great work!
> 
> Best regards,
> Peter
> 
> 
-- 
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	Systems Administrator		Internet:
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