rsync - Jun 2005 - handling duplicate names deterministically and adding alternative checksum algorithms

Thanks, rsync developers, for creating such a great tool.

I'm a member of a team of system administrators and integrators that
use rsync with SystemImager and Cfengine to rapidly deploy and
prescriptively maintain systems.  Our current practices would benefit
if rsync were enhanced to handle duplicate names deterministically as
described in the todo list.  If we were able to use rsync to overlay a
base system image directory with customization directories, then we
would also be interested in the ability to optionally use a stronger
checksum algorithm.  Then we could use rsync to replace our use of the
Tripwire file system integrity checking tool.

I was planning on doing this work myself sometime in FY06.  I would
start sooner, but I have a lot of other projects with higher
priorities, and I am attempting to arrange for specific funding for
this work.

Is anyone else was already working on these features?

Thanks again,

Andrew Shewmaker

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 05:24:45PM -0600, Andrew Shewmaker
wrote:
> Our current practices would benefit if rsync were enhanced to handle
> duplicate names deterministically as described in the todo list.
One proposed solution to this was to use a functioned called
mergesort().  A patch was provided that includes a compatibility
function for systems that don't include mergesort():

    http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2004-August/010398.html
> we would also be interested in the ability to optionally use a
> stronger checksum algorithm.
I just put a diff into the patches dir that implements the --md5 option
(extracted and cleaned up from a larger patch set that was sent to me by
Wolfgang Neuman):

    http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/unpacked/rsync/patches/md5.diff

As you'd expect, this tells rsync to use MD5 checksums instead of MD4.

..wayne..