On 8/3/2011 11:48 AM, Warren Young wrote:
> On 8/3/2011 10:11 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Rsync barely works well on Windows
>> So what does???
>
> Please, can we drop the petty advocacy?
That was only partly petty - I'm interested in an answer to the question
if there is one, and I don't think ftp is that great.
> As for rsync, there are a bunch of problems.
>
> One is that the source is highly unportable. It heavily uses forks and
> pipes and such which have no direct equivalent under Windows. All of
> that would have to be abstracted away as they've done in the
> first-quality ports mentioned above.
Yes, I've been surprised that no one has done a native port. Hmmm, I
wonder how hard it would be to adapt the rsync-in-perl flavor that is
built into backuppc on top of the first-class ports of strawberry or
active perl?
> Until then, you're forced to build and use it under Cygwin, which brings
> its own problems: heavyweight native API wrappers, its own bugs[*],
> incomplete POSIX semantics despite best efforts, etc. (* Years ago,
> there was a really nasty bug in Cygwin signal handling that caused it to
> hang hard during transfers. This was well known for years, and went
> undiagnosed in large part because of attitudes like yours. "Well, it's
> Windows, what do you expect?") BTW, I say this as a long-time Cygwin
> contributor and supporter.
Yes, I'm aware of the bug in the versions before the cygwin 1.7 release.
It didn't affect rsync-as-a-daemon or initiating an rsync command over
ssh from the windows side - only rsync started under sshd. But
old/fixed bugs aren't particularly interesting (even though I did point
them out about windows ftp because I saw them as something generic and
predictable while long-standing cygwin bugs have been rare...).
> Bottom line: no, I would not recommend rsync to a Windows user. It's
> fine today for those of us who already use Cygwin for other reasons, but
> to outsiders, it's a mess.
But what is the easier/better alternative for cross platform use?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
