rsync - Oct 2013 - rsync-3.1.0 --chown, --usermap, and --groupmap ignored?

The man page describes options --chown, --usermap, and --groupmap, but
these seem to be silently ignored beyond validating that the user and
groups do indeed exist.  Is the following supposed to work?

$ touch a
$ rsync --chown=http:http a b
$ ls -l a b
-rw-r--r-- 1 jed jed 0 Oct 14 02:44 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 jed jed 0 Oct 14 02:45 b
$ chown http:http b
chown: changing ownership of 'b': Operation not permitted
$ rm b
$ rsync --chown=jed:http a b
$ ls -l b
-rw-r--r-- 1 jed jed 0 Oct 14 02:46 b
$ chown jed:http b
$ ls -l b
-rw-r--r-- 1 jed http 0 Oct 14 02:46 b
$ rsync --version
rsync  version 3.1.0  protocol version 31
Copyright (C) 1996-2013 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
Web site: http://rsync.samba.org/
Capabilities:
    64-bit files, 64-bit inums, 64-bit timestamps, 64-bit long ints,
    socketpairs, hardlinks, symlinks, IPv6, batchfiles, inplace,
    append, ACLs, xattrs, iconv, symtimes, prealloc

rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.
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On Sun 13 Oct 2013, Jed Brown wrote:
> The man page describes options --chown, --usermap, and --groupmap, but
> these seem to be silently ignored beyond validating that the user and
> groups do indeed exist.  Is the following supposed to work?
No, because you're not running the rsync command as the superuser,
and not using the --owner / --group options.


Paul