rsync - Jan 2006 - --files-from and --delete mutually exclusive?

Hi rsync developers,

I'm trying to get some fancy mirroring done with selecting files from a
larger archive through the --files-from option. The only problem that I
do see is that rsync will not eat the --delete option whatever I try.
Thus, all the old files remain in the mirror archive instead of being
deleted.

To be more clearly, I want the rsync --files-from option to behave like
"take these files out of $TARGET and *ONLY* these files", i.e.
deleting
*EVERYTHING* there is except the files given in the index file added to
--files-from.

Am I just not getting the point of --files-from or is that indeed not
working as should in rync 2.6.4 through 2.6.6?

Thanks for any pointers. Please CC me on replys as I don't want even one
more mailing list in my inbox.

-- 
Best regards,
 Kilian
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On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Kilian Krause
wrote:
> To be more clearly, I want the rsync --files-from option to behave like
> "take these files out of $TARGET and *ONLY* these files", i.e.
deleting
> *EVERYTHING* there is except the files given in the index file added to
> --files-from.
That's not how deletions or --files-from works.  The --delete option
only affects dirs that it has sent by rsync in whole.  The --files-from
option allows for the copying of scattered files without affecting the
destination files outside of those listed.

What you want to do instead is to use an include/exclude file so that
rsync can send an entire hierarchy of directories, not individual files.
For instance, instead of this files-from file:

foo/bar/baz
foo/extra
bar/another

You could write something like this:

+ /foo/
+ /foo/bar/
+ /foo/bar/baz
+ /foo/extra
+ /bar/
+ /bar/another
- /foo/*
- /foo/bar/*
- /bar/*
- /*

And use that as an --exclude-from file while copying a single starting
dir.  It's a more involved syntax, but it wouldn't be hard to write a
perl script that could take a list of files and turn it into a set of
include/exclude directives.  In fact, I've attached one to this email.

..wayne..
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#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my %hash;

while (<>) {
    chomp;
    s#^/+##;
    my $path = '/';
    while (m#([^/]+/)/*#g) {
	$path .= $1;
	print "+ $path\n" unless $hash{$path}++;
    }
    if (m#([^/]+)$#) {
	print "+ $path$1\n";
    } else {
	delete $hash{$path};
    }
}

foreach (sort keys %hash) {
    print "- $_*\n";
}
print "- /*\n";