severity 640492 normal
tags +wontfix
merge 640492 160982
thanks
On Mon 05 Sep 2011, Heiko Schlittermann wrote:
> When I call
>
> rsync z a b c dest/
>
> rsync re-orders die filelist and transfers in alphabetical order.
> This breaks some remote applications, in case they expect the files
> appearing in some specific order. (debian reprepro + inoticoming as one
> exampl).
Filesystems don't guarantee that files will be written into the
directory in order of writing. Additionally, rsync first transfers to a
temp file and renames when done, so anything that is watching a
directory will see multiple events happening anyway.
> And I believe, this behaviour breaks that what a unix user would expect.
I'm a unix user since 1984, and I've learnt to test things to understand
how they work :) Also rsync does work (more or less) on more than just
unix-like systems, so that's hardly an argument.
In this case rsync orders the files to be sent as that is appropriate
for the algorithm that is used to update the destination. In this
special case that wouldn't strictly be necessary, but catering for such
special cases would make rsync slower for the vast majority of use
cases.
A simple workaround is of course to transfer the out of order files in
separate rsync runs. In your example: first do z, then do the rest.
As a workaround is trivially made, I cannot see how this could be
classified as an important bug; especially since this behaviour has been
around since the beginnings of rsync. Hence I'm changing the severity to
"normal". Additionally, it's basically the same issue as described in
bug report 160982 ("rsync alphabetizes files") , so I'm merging these
bug reports, and marking it wontfix: I cannot imagine that rsync will be
changed ever to not sort the file list.
Paul
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