Dave Dykstra wrote:
> Someone posted a similar patch back in February and Tridge and I were both
> pretty opposed to it. See the thread beginning at
>
> http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-February/001787.html
I was the one that posted the patch.
One of the problems that Dave and Tridge had was the amount of changes that
were required to make it work added too much complexity to the code.
The problem I had in developing the code is that atimes had to be fixed for
every file is touched, each time it's opened.
I proposed that we go to a system where do_open() and do_close() were always
used instead of fopen/open and fclose/close, and that way you could put the
atime handling code in those functions and even compile it out via ifdef's
if needed.
If everywhere in rsync, do_open() and do_close() were used consistently,
atime support would be a trivial patch.
Dave and Tridge seemed ambivalent about the idea of consistently using open
and close wrapper functions, so I never spent the time to do a patch, as it
required a lot of work, and I didn't want to bother unless I knew it had a
good change of being accepted.
I think that rsync should provide the *option* to do atimes, and I think
it'd be useful too, if one could look at the code and easily add in hooks
for every place a file is touched along the way (which could be done if
wrapper functions were consistently used for opens and closes).
Anyway, that's my $0.02. I am willing to collaborate with anyone interested
in working up a better patch that Tridge and Dave might accept.
> I think inode change times are much more valuable than access times.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. I think the user should have a
choice.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
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