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?