rsync - Jul 2010 - Behavioral differences between versions.

Greetings,

We are upgrading systems in our lab from rhel4 to rhel5.  We've
noticed a number of differences in behavior while using the same
arguments on the same data set.  We get different sent and received
counts.  We also had one case with some data corruption that was only
fixed after telling rsync to checksum everything.

I was hoping someone in the list can point me to some better
information. There are 2 points of interest.

1.  When using the -z option, does rsync actually use
/usr/bin/compress or does it use gzip?  The man pages say it
compresses data but doesn't specify what it compresses with.

2.  I was looking for detailed documentation on behavioral changes of
arguments between rsync versions.

If I can't find anything in the documentation I'll post more details
about specific behaviors later.

Thanks,

Jeff

-- 
Jeff Cleverley
Unix Systems Administrator
4380 Ziegler Road
Fort Collins, Colorado 80525
970-288-4611

On Wed 21 Jul 2010, Jeff Cleverley wrote:
> 
> 1.  When using the -z option, does rsync actually use
> /usr/bin/compress or does it use gzip?  The man pages say it
> compresses data but doesn't specify what it compresses with.
It uses the gzip algorithm but implements it internally; it doesn't call
any external program. That wouldn't be at all practical on a
communication link which is effectively interactive (one side sends
data, the other side reacts).
> 2.  I was looking for detailed documentation on behavioral changes of
> arguments between rsync versions.
I suggest examining the NEWS and OLDNEWS files in the rsync source.


Paul