rsync - May 2005 - Apple patched rsync

Hi

It seems that the rsync binary that ships with Apple's new OSX 10.4 has
some custom patch applied that enables it to use extended attributes.
According to the man page the "--extended-attributes" or
"-E" option is
the trick.

All Linux binaries I have come across do not support this option, so that
rsyncing from OSX to Linux fails.

I was wondering whether it would be possible to patch rsync to support
this on Linux (I already found out that this is dependent on the
underlying filesystem, which is XFS in my case).


Best regards,

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On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 03:03:11PM +0200, Dick Visser
wrote:
> It seems that the rsync binary that ships with Apple's new OSX 10.4 has
> some custom patch applied that enables it to use extended attributes.
Yes, I've heard about that but haven't ever seen the patch.  I've
heard
some bad things about its behavior, though, such as recopying all the
extended attribute files on every copy.

The main rsync distribution has a diff in the "patches" dir for ACL
support, but that's not quite the same thing (it adds the -A / --acls
option).

Fedora's rawhide RPM has an additional patch for xattr support (which
adds the -X / --xattrs option) which I've just added to the
"patches"
dir of CVS (after tweaking it a little bit).

It would be interesting to compare what Apple is doing with the xattrs
support -- doesn't Tiger now support Posix extended attribute calls?

I would be nice to get some extended attribute support merged into the
next rsync, but we'll see how that works out as we go.

..wayne..