Re: ftp mirrors

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon@panix.com>]

> You're suggesting that rsync is clever enough to see two files on
> the server, foo-2000-06-09 and foo-2000-06-10, see that the client
> already has foo-2000-06-09, and make the leap that the -09 and -10
> files are probably pretty close to each other, so do a diff between
> the server's -09 and -10 and send that diff?

If rsync just concatenates the files or something equivalent it should
be able to get this result without a special case (at least some of
the time).  See

http://rsync.samba.org/rsync/tech_report/

especially the section on "checksum searching".  Of course it would be
good if someone would actually test it to verify this happens in real
world cases like snapshots.

There is hair and possible adverse effects in the cases where rsync
can't do it's magic, but I guess at least in the case of cvsup, we
(well, Jeff anyway :-)) were willing to deal with the hair if Andrew
did the work of actually maintaining the thing.