NEWS for rsync 3.0.0 (1 Mar 2008)

Protocol: 30 (changed)

Changes since 2.6.9:

NOTABLE CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR:

- The handling of implied directories when using --relative has changed to

send them as directories (e.g. no implied dir is ever sent as a symlink).

This avoids unexpected behavior and should not adversely affect most

people. If you're one of those rare individuals who relied upon having

an implied dir be duplicated as a symlink, you should specify the

transfer of the symlink and the transfer of the referent directory as

separate args. (See also --keep-dirlinks and --no-implied-dirs.)

Also, exclude rules no longer have a partial effect on implied dirs.

- Requesting a remote file-listing without specifying -r (--recursive) now

sends the -d (--dirs) option to the remote rsync rather than sending -r

along with an extra exclude of /*/*. If the remote rsync does not

understand the -d option (i.e. it is 2.6.3 or older), you will need to

either turn off -d (--no-d), or specify -r --exclude='/*/*' manually.

- In --dry-run mode, the last line of the verbose summary text is output

with a "(DRY RUN)" suffix to help remind you that no updates were made.

Similarly, --only-write-batch outputs "(BATCH ONLY)".

- A writable rsync daemon with "use chroot" disabled now defaults to a

symlink-munging behavior designed to make symlinks safer while also

allowing absolute symlinks to be stored and retrieved. This also has

the effect of making symlinks unusable while they're in the daemon's

hierarchy. See the daemon's "munge symlinks" parameter for details.

- Starting up an extra copy of an rsync daemon will not clobber the pidfile

for the running daemon -- if the pidfile exists, the new daemon will exit

with an error. This means that your wrapper script that starts the rsync

daemon should be made to handle lock-breaking (if you want any automatic

breaking of locks to be done).

BUG FIXES:

- A daemon with "use chroot = no" and excluded items listed in the daemon

config file now properly checks an absolute-path arg specified for these

options: --compare-dest, --link-dest, --copy-dest, --partial-dir,

--backup-dir, --temp-dir, and --files-from.

- A daemon can now be told to disable all user- and group-name translation

on a per-module basis. This avoids a potential problem with a writable

daemon module that has "use chroot" enabled -- if precautions weren't

taken, a user could try to add a missing library and get rsync to use

it. This makes rsync safer by default, and more configurable when id-

translation is not desired. See the daemon's "numeric ids" parameter

for full details.

- A chroot daemon can now indicate which part of its path should affect the

chroot call, and which part should become an inside-chroot path for the

module. This allows you to have outside-the-transfer paths (such as for

libraries) even when you enable chroot protection. The idiom used in the

rsyncd.conf file is: path = /chroot/dirs/./dirs/inside

- If a file's data arrived successfully on the receiving side but the

rename of the temporary file to the destination file failed AND the

--remove-source-files (or the deprecated --remove-sent-files) option

was specified, rsync no longer erroneously removes the associated

source file.

- Fixed the output of -ii when combined with one of the --*-dest options:

it now itemizes all the items, not just the changed ones.

- Made the output of all file types consistent when using a --*-dest

option. Prior versions would output too many creation events for

matching items.

- The code that waits for a child pid now handles being interrupted by a

signal. This fixes a problem with the pre-xfer exec function not being

able to get the exit status from the script.

- A negated filter rule (i.e. with a '!' modifier) no longer loses the

negation when sending the filter rules to the remote rsync.

- Fixed a problem with the --out-format (aka --log-format) option %f: it

no longer outputs superfluous directory info for a non-daemon rsync.

- Fixed a problem with -vv (double --verbose) and --stats when "pushing"

files (which includes local copies). Version 2.6.9 would complete the

copy, but exit with an error when the receiver output its memory stats.

- If --password-file is used on a non-daemon transfer, rsync now complains

and exits. This should help users figure out that they can't use this

option to control a remote shell's password prompt.

- Make sure that directory permissions of a newly-created destination

directory are handled right when --perms is left off.

- The itemized output of a newly-created destination directory is now

output as a creation event, not a change event.

- Improved --hard-link so that more corner cases are handled correctly

when combined with options such as --link-dest and/or --ignore-existing.

- The --append option no longer updates a file that has the same size.

- Fixed a bug when combining --backup and --backup-dir with --inplace:

any missing backup directories are now created.

- Fixed a bug when using --backup and --inplace with --whole-file or

--read-batch: backup files are actually created now.

- The daemon pidfile is checked and created sooner in the startup sequence.

- If a daemon module's "path" value is not an absolute pathname, the code

now makes it absolute internally (making it work properly).

- Ensure that a temporary file always has owner-write permission while we

are writing to it. This avoids problems with some network filesystems

when transfering read-only files.

- Any errors output about password-file reading no longer cause an error at

the end of the run about a partial transfer.

- The --read-batch option for protocol 30 now ensures that several more

options are set correctly for the current batch file: --iconv, --acls,

--xattrs, --inplace, --append, and --append-verify.

- Using --only-write-batch to a daemon receiver now works properly (older

versions would update some files while writing the batch).

- Avoid outputting a "file has vanished" message when the file is a broken

symlink and --copy-unsafe-links or --copy-dirlinks is used (the code

already handled this for --copy-links).

- Fixed the combination of --only-write-batch and --dry-run.

- Fixed rsync's ability to remove files that are not writable by the file's

owner when rsync is running as the same user.

ENHANCEMENTS:

- A new incremental-recursion algorithm is now used when rsync is talking

to another 3.x version. This starts the transfer going more quickly

(before all the files have been found), and requires much less memory.

See the --recursive option in the manpage for some restrictions.

- Lowered memory use in the non-incremental-recursion algorithm for typical

option values (usually saving from 21-29 bytes per file).

- The default --delete algorithm is now --delete-during when talking to a

3.x rsync. This is a faster scan than using --delete-before (which is

the default when talking to older rsync versions), and is compatible with

the new incremental recursion mode.

- Rsync now allows multiple remote-source args to be specified rather than

having to rely on a special space-splitting side-effect of the remote-

shell. Additional remote args must specify the same host or an empty one

(e.g. empty: :file1 or ::module/file2). For example, this means that

local use of brace expansion now works: rsync -av host:dir/{f1,f2} .

- Added the --protect-args (-s) option, that tells rsync to send most of

the command-line args at the start of the transfer rather than as args

to the remote-shell command. This protects them from space-splitting,

and only interprets basic wildcard special shell characters (*?[).

- Added the --delete-delay option, which is a more efficient way to delete

files at the end of the transfer without needing a separate delete pass.

- Added the --acls (-A) option to preserve Access Control Lists. This is

an improved version of the prior patch that was available, and it even

supports OS X ACLs. If you need to have backward compatibility with old,

ACL-patched versions of rsync, apply the acls.diff file from the patches

dir.

- Added the --xattrs (-X) option to preserve extended attributes. This is

an improved version of the prior patch that was available, and it even

supports OS X xattrs (which includes their resource fork data). If you

need to have backward compatibility with old, xattr-patched versions of

rsync, apply the xattrs.diff file from the patches dir.

- Added the --fake-super option that allows a non-super user to preserve

all attributes of a file by using a special extended-attribute idiom.

It even supports the storing of foreign ACL data on your backup server.

There is also an analogous "fake super" parameter for an rsync daemon.

- Added the --iconv option, which allows rsync to convert filenames from

one character-set to another during the transfer. The default is to

make this feature available as long as your system has iconv_open().

If compilation fails, specify --disable-iconv to configure, and then

rebuild. If you want rsync to perform character-set conversions by

default, you can specify --enable-iconv=CONVERT_STRING with the default

value for the --iconv option that you wish to use. For example,

"--enable-iconv=." is a good choice. See the rsync manpage for an

explanation of the --iconv option's settings.

- A new daemon config parameter, "charset", lets you control the character-

set that is used during an --iconv transfer to/from a daemon module. You

can also set your daemon to refuse "no-iconv" if you want to force the

client to use an --iconv transfer (requiring an rsync 3.x client).

- Added the --skip-compress=LIST option to override the default list of

file suffixes that will not be compressed when using --compress (-z).

- The daemon's default for "dont compress" was extended to include:

*.7z *.mp[34] *.mov *.avi *.ogg *.jpg *.jpeg

The name-matching routine was also optimized to run more quickly.

- The --max-delete option now outputs a warning if it skipped any file

deletions, including a count of how many deletions were skipped. (Older

versions just silently stopped deleting things.)

- You may specify --max-delete=0 to a 3.0.0 client to request that it warn

about extraneous files without deleting anything. If you're not sure

what version the client is, you can use the less-obvious --max-delete=-1,

as both old and new versions will treat that as the same request (though

older versions don't warn).

- The --hard-link option now uses less memory on both the sending and

receiving side for all protocol versions. For protocol 30, the use of a

hashtable on the sending side allows us to more efficiently convey to the

receiver what files are linked together. This reduces the amount of data

sent over the socket by a considerable margin (rather than adding more

data), and limits the in-memory storage of the device+inode information

to just the sending side for the new protocol 30, or to the receiving

side when speaking an older protocol (note that older rsync versions kept

the device+inode information on both sides).

- The filter rules now support a perishable ("p") modifier that marks rules

that should not have an effect in a directory that is being deleted. e.g.

-f '-p .svn/' would only affect "live" .svn directories.

- Rsync checks all the alternate-destination args for validity (e.g.

--link-dest). This lets the user know when they specified a directory

that does not exist.

- If we get an ENOSYS error setting the time on a symlink, we don't

complain about it anymore (for those systems that even support the

setting of the modify-time on a symlink).

- Protocol 30 now uses MD5 checksums instead of MD4.

- Changed the --append option to not checksum the existing data in the

destination file, which speeds up file appending.

- Added the --append-verify option, which works like the older --append

option (verifying the existing data in the destination file). For

compatibility with older rsync versions, any use of --append that is

talking protocol 29 or older will revert to the --append-verify method.

- Added the --contimeout=SECONDS option that lets the user specify a

connection timeout for rsync daemon access.

- Documented and extended the support for the RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG variable

that can be used to enhance the client side of a daemon connection.

- Improved the dashes and double-quotes in the nroff manpage output.

- Rsync now supports a lot more --no-OPTION override options.

INTERNAL:

- The file-list sorting algorithm now uses a sort that keeps any same-

named items in the same order as they were specified. This allows

rsync to always ensure that the first of the duplicates is the one

that will be included in the copy. The new sort is also faster

than the glibc version of qsort() and mergesort().

- Rsync now supports the transfer of 64-bit timestamps (time_t values).

- Made the file-deletion code use a little less stack when recursing

through a directory hierarchy of extraneous files.

- Fixed a build problem with older (2.x) versions of gcc.

- Added some isType() functions that make dealing with signed characters

easier without forcing variables via casts.

- Changed strcat/strcpy/sprintf function calls to use safer versions.

- Upgraded the included popt version to 1.10.2 and improved its use of

string-handling functions.

- Added missing prototypes for compatibility functions from the lib dir.

- Configure determines if iconv() has a const arg, allowing us to avoid a

compiler warning.

- Made the sending of some numbers more efficient for protocol 30.

- Make sure that a daemon process doesn't mind if the client was weird and

omitted the --server option.

- There are more internal logging categories available in protocol 30 than

the age-old FINFO and FERROR, including FERROR_XFER and FWARN. These new

categories allow some errors and warnings to go to stderr without causing

an erroneous end-of-run warning about some files not being able to be

transferred.

- Improved the use of "const" on pointers.

- Improved J.W.'s pool_alloc routines to add a way of incrementally freeing

older sections of a pool's memory.

- The getaddrinfo.c compatibility code in the "lib" dir was replaced with

some new code (derived from samba, derived from PostgreSQL) that has a

better license than the old code.

DEVELOPER RELATED:

- Rsync is now licensed under the GPLv3 or later.

- Rsync is now being maintained in a "git" repository instead of CVS

(though the old CVS repository still exists for historical access).

Several maintenance scripts were updated to work with git.

- Generated files are no longer committed into the source repository. The

autoconf and autoheader commands are now automatically run during the

normal use of "configure" and "make". The latest dev versions of all

generated files can also be copied from the samba.org web site (see the

prepare-source script's fetch option).

- The "patches" directory of diff files is now built from branches in the

rsync git repository (branch patch/FOO creates file patches/FOO.diff).

This directory is now distributed in a separate separate tar file named

rsync-patches-VERSION.tar.gz instead of the main rsync-VERSION.tar.gz.

- The proto.h file is now built using a simple perl script rather than a

complex awk script, which proved to be more widely compatible.

- When running the tests, we now put our per-test temp dirs into a sub-

directory named testtmp (which is created, if missing). This allows

someone to symlink the testtmp directory to another filesystem (which is

useful if the build dir's filesystem does not support ACLs and xattrs,

but another filesystem does).

- Rsync now has a way of handling protocol-version changes during the

development of a new protocol version. This causes any out-of-sync

versions to speak an older protocol rather than fail in a cryptic manner.

This addition makes it safer to deploy a pre-release version that may

interact with the public. This new exchange of sub-version info does not

interfere with the {MIN,MAX}_PROTOCOL_VERSION checking algorithm (which

does not have enough range to allow the main protocol number to be

incremented for every minor tweak in that happens during development).

- The csprotocol.txt file was updated to mention the daemon protocol change

in the 3.0.0 release.



NEWS for rsync 2.6.9 (6 Nov 2006)

Protocol: 29 (unchanged)

Changes since 2.6.8:

BUG FIXES:

- If rsync is interrupted via a handled signal (such as SIGINT), it will

once again clean-up its temp file from the destination dir.

- Fixed an overzealous sanitizing bug in the handling of the --link-dest,

--copy-dest, and --compare-dest options to a daemon without chroot: if

the copy's destination dir is deeper than the top of the module's path,

these options now accept a safe number of parent-dir (../) references

(since these options are relative to the destination dir). The old code

incorrectly chopped off all "../" prefixes for these options, no matter

how deep the destination directory was in the module's hierarchy.

- Fixed a bug where a deferred info/error/log message could get sent

directly to the sender instead of being handled by rwrite() in the

generator. This fixes an "unexpected tag 3" fatal error, and should

also fix a potential problem where a deferred info/error message from

the receiver might bypass the log file and get sent only to the client

process. (These problems could only affect an rsync daemon that was

receiving files.)

- Fixed a bug when --inplace was combined with a --*-dest option and we

update a file's data using an alternate basis file. The code now

notices that it needs to copy the matching data from the basis file

instead of (wrongly) assuming that it was already present in the file.

- Fixed a bug where using --dry-run with a --*-dest option with a path

relative to a directory that does not yet exist: the affected option

gets its proper path value so that the output of the dry-run is right.

- Fixed a bug in the %f logfile escape when receiving files: the

destination path is now included in the output (e.g. you can now tell

when a user specifies a subdir inside a module).

- If the receiving side fails to create a directory, it will now skip

trying to update everything that is inside that directory.

- If --link-dest is specified with --checksum but without --times, rsync

will now allow a hard-link to be created to a matching link-dest file

even when the file's modify-time doesn't match the server's file.

- The daemon now calls more timezone-using functions prior to doing a

chroot. This should help some C libraries to generate proper timestamps

from inside a chrooted daemon (and to not try to access /etc/timezone

over and over again).

- Fixed a bug in the handling of an absolute --partial-dir=ABS_PATH option:

it now deletes an alternate basis file from the partial-dir that was used

to successfully update a destination file.

- Fixed a bug in the handling of --delete-excluded when using a per-dir

merge file: the merge file is now honored on the receiving side, and

only its unqualified include/exclude commands are ignored (just as is

done for global include/excludes).

- Fixed a recent bug where --delete was not working when transferring from

the root (/) of the filesystem with --relative enabled.

- Fixed a recent bug where an --exclude='*' could affect the root (/) of

the filesystem with --relative enabled.

- When --inplace creates a file, it is now created with owner read/write

permissions (0600) instead of no permissions at all. This avoids a

problem continuing a transfer that was interrupted (since --inplace

will not update a file that has no write permissions).

- If either --remove-source-files or --remove-sent-files is enabled and we

are unable to remove the source file, rsync now outputs an error.

- Fixed a bug in the daemon's "incoming chmod" rule: newly-created

directories no longer get the 'F' (file) rules applied to them.

- Fixed an infinite loop bug when a filter rule was rejected due to being

overly long.

- When the server receives a --partial-dir option from the client, it no

longer runs the client-side code that adds an assumed filter rule (since

the client will be sending us the rules in the usual manner, and they

may have chosen to override the auto-added rule).

ENHANCEMENTS:

- Added the --log-file=FILE and --log-file-format=FORMAT options. These

can be used to tell any rsync to output what it is doing to a log file.

They work with a client rsync, a non-daemon server rsync (see the man

page for instructions), and also allows the overriding of rsyncd.conf

settings when starting a daemon.

- The --log-format option was renamed to be --out-format to avoid confusing

it with affecting the log-file output. (The old option remains as an

alias for the new to preserve backward compatibility.)

- Made "log file" and "syslog facility" settable on a per-module basis in

the daemon's config file.

- Added the --remove-source-files option as a replacement for the (now

deprecated) --remove-sent-files option. This new option removes all

non-dirs from the source directories, even if the file was already

up-to-date. This fixes a problem where interrupting an rsync that

was using --remove-sent-files and restarting it could leave behind

a file that the earlier rsync synchronized, but didn't get to remove.

(The deprecated --remove-sent-files is still understood for now, and

still behaves in the same way as before.)

- Added the option --no-motd to suppress the message-of-the-day output

from a daemon when doing a copy. (See the manpage for a caveat.)

- Added a new environment variable to the pre-/post-xfer exec commands (in

the daemon's config file): RSYNC_PID. This value will be the same in

both the pre- and post-xfer commands, so it can be used as a unique ID

if the pre-xfer command wants to cache some arg/request info for the

post-xfer command.

INTERNAL:

- Did a code audit using IBM's code-checker program and made several

changes, including: replacing most of the strcpy() and sprintf()

calls with strlcpy(), snprintf(), and memcpy(), adding a 0-value to

an enum that had been intermingling a literal 0 with the defined enum

values, silencing some uninitialized memory checks, marking some

functions with a "noreturn" attribute, and changing an "if" that

could never succeed on some platforms into a pre-processor directive

that conditionally compiles the code.

- Fixed a potential bug in f_name_cmp() when both the args are a

top-level "." dir (which doesn't happen in normal operations).

- Changed exit_cleanup() so that it can never return instead of exit.

The old code might return if it found the exit_cleanup() function

was being called recursively. The new code is segmented so that

any recursive calls move on to the next step of the exit-processing.

- The macro WIFEXITED(stat) will now be defined if the OS didn't already

define it.

DEVELOPER RELATED:

- The acls.diff and xattrs.diff patches have received a bunch of work to

make them much closer to being acceptable in the main distribution.

The xattrs patch also has some preliminary Mac OS X and FreeBSD

compatibility code that various system types to exchange extended

file-attributes.

- A new diff in the patches dir, fake-root.diff, allows rsync to

maintain a backup hierarchy with full owner, group, and device info

without actually running as root. It does this using a special

extended attribute, so it depends on xattrs.diff (which depends on

acls.diff).

- The rsync.yo and rsyncd.conf.yo files have been updated to work

better with the latest yodl 2.x releases.

- Updated config.guess and config.sub to their 2006-07-02 versions.

- Updated various files to include the latest FSF address and to have

consistent opening comments.



NEWS for rsync 2.6.8 (22 Apr 2006)

Protocol: 29 (unchanged)

Changes since 2.6.7:

BUG FIXES:

- Fixed a bug in the exclude code where an anchored exclude without any

wildcards fails to match an absolute source arg, but only when --relative

is in effect.

- Improved the I/O code for the generator to fix a potential hang when the

receiver gets an EOF on the socket but the generator's select() call

never indicates that the socket is writable for it to be notified about

the EOF. (This can happen when using stunnel).

- Fixed a problem with the file-reading code where a failed read (such as

that caused by a bad sector) would not advance the file's read-position

beyond the failed read's data.

- Fixed a logging bug where the "log file" directive was not being honored

in a single-use daemon (one spawned by a remote-shell connection or by

init).

- If rsync cannot honor the --delete option, we output an error and exit

instead of silently ignoring the option.

- Fixed a bug in the --link-dest code that prevented special files (such as

fifos) from being linked.

- The ability to hard-link symlinks and special files is now determined at

configure time instead of at runtime. This fixes a bug with --link-dest

creating a hard-link to a symlink's referent on a BSD system.

ENHANCEMENTS:

- In daemon mode, if rsync fails to bind to the requested port, the

error(s) returned by socket() and/or bind() are now logged.

- When we output a fatal error, we now output the version of rsync in the

message.

- Improved the documentation for the --owner and --group options.

- The rsyncstats script in "support" has an improved line-parsing regex

that is easier to read and also makes it to parse syslog-generated lines.

- A new script in "support": file-attr-restore, can be used to restore the

attributes of a file-set (the permissions, ownership, and group info)

taken from the cached output of a "find ARG... -ls" command.

DEVELOPER RELATED:

- Removed the unused function write_int_named(), the unused variable

io_read_phase, and the rarely used variable io_write_phase. This also

elides the confusing 'phase "unknown"' part of one error message.

- Removed two unused configure checks and two related (also unused)

compatibility functions.

- The xattrs.diff patch received a security fix that prevents a potential

buffer overflow in the receive_xattr() code.

- The acls.diff patch has been improved quite a bit, with more to come.

- A new patch was added: log-file.diff. This contains an early version of

a future option, --log-file=FILE, that will allow any rsync to log its

actions to a file (something that only a daemon supports at present).



NEWS for rsync 2.6.7 (11 Mar 2006)

Protocol: 29 (unchanged)

Changes since 2.6.6:

OUTPUT CHANGES:

- The letter 'D' in the itemized output was being used for both devices

(character or block) as well as other special files (such as fifos and

named sockets). This has changed to separate non-device special files

under the 'S' designation (e.g. "cS+++++++ path/fifo"). See also the

"--specials" option, below.

- The way rsync escapes unreadable characters has changed. First, rsync

now has support for recognizing valid multibyte character sequences in

your current locale, allowing it to escape fewer characters than before

for a locale such as UTF-8. Second, it now uses an escape idiom of

"\#123", which is the literal string "\#" followed by exactly 3 octal

digits. Rsync no longer doubles a backslash character in a filename

(e.g. it used to output "foo\\bar" when copying "foo\bar") -- now it only

escapes a backslash that is followed by a hash-sign and 3 digits (0-9)

(e.g. it will output "foo\#134#789" when copying "foo\#789"). See also

the --8-bit-output (-8) option, mentioned below.

Script writers: the local rsync is the one that outputs escaped names,

so if you need to support unescaping of filenames for older rsyncs, I'd

suggest that you parse the output of "rsync --version" and only use the

old unescaping rules for 2.6.5 and 2.6.6.

BUG FIXES:

- Fixed a really old bug that caused --checksum (-c) to checksum all the

files encountered during the delete scan (ouch).

- Fixed a potential hang in a remote generator: when the receiver gets a

read-error on the socket, it now signals the generator about this so that

the generator does not try to send any of the terminating error messages

to the client (avoiding a potential hang in some setups).

- Made hard-links work with symlinks and devices again.

- If the sender gets an early EOF reading a source file, we propagate this

error to the receiver so that it can discard the file and try requesting

it again (which is the existing behavior for other kinds of read errors).

- If a device-file/special-file changes permissions, rsync now updates the

permissions without recreating the file.

- If the user specifies a remote-host for both the source and destination,

we now output a syntax error rather than trying to open the destination

hostspec as a filename.

- When --inplace creates a new destination file, rsync now creates it with

permissions 0600 instead of 0000 -- this makes restarting possible when

the transfer gets interrupted in the middle of sending a new file.

- Reject the combination of --inplace and --sparse since the sparse-output

algorithm doesn't work when overwriting existing data.

- Fixed the directory name in the error that is output when pop_dir()

fails.

- Really fixed the parsing of a "!" entry in .cvsignore files this time.

- If the generator gets a stat() error on a file, output it (this used to

require at least -vv for the error to be seen).

- If waitpid() fails or the child rsync didn't exit cleanly, we now handle

the exit status properly and generate a better error.

- Fixed some glitches in the double-verbose output when using --copy-dest,

--link-dest, or --compare-dest. Also improved how the verbose output

handles hard-links (within the transfer) that had an up-to-date alternate

"dest" file, and copied files (via --copy-dest).

- Fixed the matching of the dont-compress items (e.g. *.gz) against files

that have a path component containing a slash.

- If the code reading a filter/exclude file gets an EINTR error, rsync now

clears the error flag on the file handle so it can keep on reading.

- If --relative is active, the sending side cleans up trailing "/" or "/."

suffixes to avoid triggering a bug in older rsync versions. Also, we now

reject a ".." dir if it would be sent as a relative dir.

- If a non-directory is in the way of a directory and rsync is run with

--dry-run and --delete, rsync no longer complains about not being able

to opendir() the not-yet present directory.

- When --list-only is used and a non-existent local destination dir was

also specified as a destination, rsync no longer generates a warning

about being unable to create the missing directory.

- Fixed some problems with --relative --no-implied-dirs when the

destination directory did not yet exist: we can now create a symlink or

device when it is the first thing in the missing dir, and --fuzzy no

longer complains about being unable to open the missing dir.

- Fixed a bug where the --copy-links option would not affect implied

directories without --copy-unsafe-links (see --relative).

- Got rid of the need for --force to be used in some circumstances with

--delete-after (making it consistent with --delete-before/-during).

- Rsync now ignores the SIGXFSZ signal, just in case your OS sends this

when a file is too large (rsync handles the write error).

- Fixed a bug in the Proxy-Authorization header's base64-encoded value: it

was not properly padded with trailing '=' chars. This only affects a

user that need to use a password-authenticated proxy for an outgoing

daemon-rsync connection.

- If we're transferring an empty directory to a new name, rsync no longer

forces S_IWUSR if it wasn't already set, nor does it accidentally leave

it set.

- Fixed a bug in the debug output (-vvvvv) that could mention the wrong

checksum for the current file offset.

- Rsync no longer allows a single directory to be copied over a non-

directory destination arg.

ENHANCEMENTS:

- Added the --append option that makes rsync append data onto files that

are longer on the source than the destination (this includes new files).

- Added the --min-size=SIZE option to exclude small files from the

transfer.

- Added the --compress-level option to allow you to set how aggressive

rsync's compression should be (this option implies --compress).

- Enhanced the parsing of the SIZE value for --min-size and --max-size to

allow easy entry of multiples of 1000 (instead of just multiples of 1024)

and off-by-one values too (e.g. --max-size=8mb-1).

- Added the --8-bit-output (-8) option, which tells rsync to avoid escaping

high-bit characters that it thinks are unreadable in the current locale.

- The new option --human-readable (-h) changes the output of --progress,

--stats, and the end-of-run summary to be easier to read. If repeated,

the units become powers of 1024 instead of powers of 1000. (The old

meaning of -h, as a shorthand for --help, still works as long as you

just use it on its own, as in "rsync -h".)

- If lutimes() and/or lchmod() are around, use them to allow the

preservation of attributes on symlinks.

- The --link-dest option now affects symlinks and devices (when possible).

- Added two config items to the rsyncd.conf parsing: "pre-xfer exec" and

"post-xfer exec". These allow a command to be specified on a per-module

basis that will be run before and/or after a daemon-mode transfer. (See

the man page for a list of the environment variables that are set with

information about the transfer.)

- When using the --relative option, you can now insert a dot dir in

the source path to indicate where the replication of the source dirs

should start. For example, if you specify a source path of

rsync://host/module/foo/bar/./baz/dir with -R, rsync will now only

replicate the "baz/dir" part of the source path (note: a trailing

dot dir is unaffected unless it also has a trailing slash).

- Added some new --no-FOO options that make it easier to override unwanted

implied or default options. For example, "-a --no-o" (aka "--archive

--no-owner") can be used to turn off the preservation of file ownership

that is implied by -a.

- Added the --chmod=MODE option that allows the destination permissions to

be changed from the source permissions. E.g. --chmod=g+w,o-rwx

- Added the "incoming chmod" and "outgoing chmod" daemon options that allow

a module to specify what permissions changes should be applied to all

files copied to and from the daemon.

- Allow the --temp-dir option to be specified when starting a daemon, which

sets the default temporary directory for incoming files.

- If --delete is combined with --dirs without --recursive, rsync will now

delete in any directory whose content is being synchronized.

- If --backup is combined with --delete without --backup-dir (and without

--delete-excluded), we add a "protect" filter-rule to ensure that files

with the backup suffix are not deleted.

- The file-count stats that are output by --progress were improved to

better indicate what the numbers mean. For instance, the output:

"(xfer#5, to-check=8383/9999)" indicates that this was the fifth file

to be transferred, and we still need to check 8383 more files out of

a total of 9999.

- The include/exclude code now allows a dir/*** directive (with 3 trailing

stars) to match both the dir itself as well as all the content below the

dir (dir/** would not match the dir).

- Added the --prune-empty-dirs (-m) option that makes the receiving rsync

discard empty chains of directories from the file-list. This makes it

easier to selectively copy files from a source hierarchy and end up with

just the directories needed to hold the resulting files.

- If the --itemize-changes (-i) option is repeated, rsync now includes

unchanged files in the itemized output (similar to -vv, but without all

the other verbose messages that can get in the way). Of course, the

client must be version 2.6.7 for this to work, but the remote rsync only

needs to be 2.6.7 if you're pushing files.

- Added the --specials option to tell rsync to copy non-device special

files (which rsync now attempts even as a normal user). The --devices

option now requests the copying of just devices (character and block).

The -D option still requests both (e.g. --devices and --specials), -a

still implies -D, and non-root users still get a silent downgrade that

omits device copying.

- Added the --super option to make the receiver always attempt super-user

activities. This is useful for systems that allow things such as devices

to be created or ownership to be set without being UID 0, and is also

useful for someone who wants to ensure that errors will be output if the

receiving rsync isn't being run as root.

- Added the --sockopts option for those few who want to customize the TCP

options used to contact a daemon rsync.

- Added a way for the --temp-dir option to be combined with a partial-dir

setting that lets rsync avoid non-atomic updates (for those times when

--temp-dir is not being used because space is tight).

- A new support script, files-to-excludes, will transform a list of files

into a set of include/exclude directives that will copy those files.

- A new option, --executability (-E) can be used to preserve just the

execute bit on files, for those times when using the --perms option is

not desired.

- The daemon now logs each connection and also each module-list request

that it receives.

- New log-format options: %M (modtime), %U (uid), %G (gid), and %B

(permission bits, e.g. "rwxr-xrwt").

- The --dry-run option no longer forces the enabling of --verbose.

- The --remove-sent-files option now does a better job of incrementally

removing the sent files on the sending side (older versions tended to

clump up all the removals at the end).

- A daemon now supersedes its minimal SIGCHLD handler with the standard

PID-remembering version after forking. This ensures that the generator

can get the child-exit status from the receiver.

- Use of the --bwlimit option no longer interferes with the remote rsync

sending error messages about invalid/refused options.

- Rsync no longer returns a usage error when used with one local source arg

and no destination: this now implies the --list-only option, just like

the comparable situation with a remote source arg.

- Added the --copy-dirlinks option, a more limited version of --copy-links.

- Various documentation improvements, including: a better synopsis, some

improved examples, a better discussion of the presence and absence of

--perms (including how it interacts with the new --executability and

--chmod options), an extended discussion of --temp-dir, an improved

discussion of --partial-dir, a better description of rsync's pattern

matching characters, an improved --no-implied-dirs section, and the

documenting of what the --stats option outputs.

- Various new and updated diffs in the patches dir, including: acls.diff,

xattrs.diff, atimes.diff, detect-renamed.diff, and slp.diff.

INTERNAL:

- We now use sigaction() and sigprocmask() if possible, and fall back on

signal() if not. Using sigprocmask() ensures that rsync enables all the

signals that it needs, just in case it was started in a masked state.

- Some buffer sizes were expanded a bit, particularly on systems where

MAXPATHLEN is overly small (e.g. cygwin).

- If io_printf() tries to format more data than fits in the buffer, exit

with an error instead of transmitting a truncated buffer.

- If a va_copy macro is defined, lib/snprintf.c will use it when defining

the VA_COPY macro.

- Reduced the amount of stack memory needed for each level of directory

recursion by nearly MAXPATHLEN bytes.

- The wildmatch function was extended to allow an array of strings to be

supplied as the string to match. This allows the exclude code to do less

string copying.

- Got rid of the safe_fname() function (and all the myriad calls) and

replaced it with a new function in the log.c code that filters all the

output going to the terminal.

- Unified the f_name() and the f_name_to() functions.

- Improved the hash-table code the sender uses to handle checksums to make

it use slightly less memory and run just a little faster.

DEVELOPER RELATED:

- The diffs in the patches dir now require "patch -p1 <DIFF" instead of

the previous -p0. Also, the version included in the release tar now

affect generated files (e.g. configure, rsync.1, proto.h, etc.), so

it is no longer necessary to run autoconf and/or yodl unless you're

applying a patch that was checked out from CVS.

- Several diffs in the patches dir now use the proper --enable-FOO

configure option instead of --with-FOO to turn on the inclusion of

the newly patched feature.

- There is a new script, "prepare-source" than can be used to update the

various generated files (proto.h, configure, etc.) even before configure

has created the Makefile (this is mainly useful when patching the source

with a patch that doesn't affect generated files).

- The testsuite now sets HOME so that it won't be affected by a file such

as ~/.popt.



NEWS for rsync 2.6.6 (28 Jul 2005)

Protocol: 29 (unchanged)

Changes since 2.6.5:

SECURITY FIXES:

- The zlib code was upgraded to version 1.2.3 in order to make it more

secure. While the widely-publicized security problem in zlib 1.2.2 did

not affect rsync, another security problem surfaced that affects rsync's

zlib 1.1.4.

BUG FIXES:

- The setting of flist->high in clean_flist() was wrong for an empty list.

This could cause flist_find() to crash in certain rare circumstances

(e.g. if just the right directory setup was around when --fuzzy was

combined with --link-dest).

- The outputting of hard-linked files when verbosity was > 1 was not right:

(1) Without -i it would output the name of each hard-linked file as

though it had been changed; it now outputs a "is hard linked" message for

the file. (2) With -i it would output all dots for the unchanged

attributes of a hard-link; it now changes those dots to spaces, as is

done for other totally unchanged items.

- When backing up a changed symlink or device, get rid of any old backup

item so that we don't get an "already exists" error.

- A couple places that were comparing a local and a remote modification-

time were not honoring the --modify-window option.

- Fixed a bug where the 'p' (permissions) itemized-changes flag might get

set too often (if some non-significant mode bits differed).

- Fixed a really old, minor bug that could cause rsync to warn about being

unable to mkdir() a path that ends in "/." because it just created the

directory (required --relative, --no-implied-dirs, a source path that

ended in either a trailing slash or a trailing "/.", and a non-existing

destination dir to tickle the bug in a recent version).

ENHANCEMENTS:

- Made the "max verbosity" setting in the rsyncd.conf file settable on a

per-module basis (which now matches the documentation).

- The support/rrsync script has been upgraded to verify the args of options

that take args (instead of rejecting any such options). The script was

also changed to try to be more secure and to fix a problem in the parsing

of a pull operation that has multiple sources.

- Improved the documentation that explains the difference between a

normal daemon transfer and a daemon-over remote-shell transfer.

- Some of the diffs supplied in the patches dir were fixed and/or

improved.

BUILD CHANGES:

- Made configure define NOBODY_USER (currently hard-wired to "nobody") and

NOBODY_GROUP (set to either "nobody" or "nogroup" depending on what we

find in the /etc/group file).

- Added a test to the test suite, itemized.test, that tests the output of

-i (log-format w/%i) and some double-verbose messages.



NEWS for rsync 2.6.5 (1 Jun 2005)

Protocol: 29 (unchanged)

Changes since 2.6.4:

OUTPUT CHANGES:

- Non-printable chars in filenames are now output using backslash-

escaped characters rather than '?'s. Any non-printable character is

output using 3 digits of octal (e.g. "\n" -> "\012"), and a backslash

is now output as "\\". Rsync also uses your locale setting, which

can make it treat fewer high-bit characters as non-printable.

- If rsync received an empty file-list when pulling files, it would

output a "nothing to do" message and exit with a 0 (success) exit

status, even if the remote rsync returned an error (it did not do

this under the same conditions when pushing files). This was changed

to make the pulling behavior the same as the pushing behavior: we

now do the normal end-of-run outputting (depending on options) and

exit with the appropriate exit status.

BUG FIXES:

- A crash bug was fixed when a daemon had its "path" set to "/", did

not have chroot enabled, and used some anchored excludes in the

rsyncd.conf file.

- Fixed a bug in the transfer of a single file when -H is specified

(rsync would either infinite loop or perhaps crash).

- Fixed a case where the generator might try (and fail) to tweak the

write-permissions of a read-only directory in list-only mode (this

only caused an annoying warning message).

- If --compare-dest or --link-dest uses a locally-copied file as the

basis for an updated version, log this better when --verbose or -i

is in effect.

- Fixed the accidental disabling of --backup during the --delete-after

processing.