Download rsync 3.0.4

rsync 3.0.4 has recently appeared on the Samba website. This program provides a quick way to synchronize all or part of files between different locations. It is therefore widely used in all kinds of synchronization programs, but also, for example, for the backup of file servers. If you want to know more, you can check the available documentation read through, which also includes a number of tutorials. The announcement is up this page and the list of changes looks like this:

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug in the hard-linking code where it would sometimes try to allocate 0 bytes of memory (which fails on some OSes, such as AIX).
• Fixed the hard-linking of files from a device that has a device number of 0 (which seems to be a common device number on NetBSD).
• Fixed the handling of a –partial-dir that cannot be created. This particularly impacts the –delay-updates option (since the files cannot be delayed without a partial-dir), and was potentially destructive if the –remove-source-files was also specified.
• Fixed a couple issues in the –fake-super handling of xattrs when the destination files have root-level attributes (eg selinux values) that a non-root copy can’t affect.
• Improved the keep-alive check in the generator to fire consistently in incremental-recursion mode when –timeout is enabled.
• The –iconv option now converts the content of a symlink too, instead of leaving it in the wrong character-set (requires 3.0.4 on both sides of the transfer).
• When using –iconv, if a filename fails to convert on the receiving side, this no longer makes deletions in the root-dir of the transfer fail silently (the user now gets a warning about deletions being disabled due to IO error as long as –ignore-errors was not specified).
• When using –iconv, if a server-side receiver can’t convert a filename, the error message sent back to the client no longer mangles the name with the wrong charset conversion.
• Fixed a potential alignment issue in the IRIX ACL code when allocating the initial “struct acl” object. Also, cast mallocs to avoid warnings.
• Changed some errors that were going to stdout to go to stderr.
• Made human_num() and human_dnum() able to output a negative number (rather than outputting a cryptic string of punctuation).

Enhancements:

• Rsync will avoid sending an -e option to the server if an older protocol is requested (and thus the option would not be useful). This lets the user specify the –protocol=29 option to access an overly-restrictive server that is rejecting the protocol-30 use of -e to the server.
• Improved the message output for an RERR_PARTIAL exit.

Developer related:

• The Makefile will not halt for just a timestamp change on the Makefile or the configure files, only for actual changes in content.
• Changed some commands in the testsuite’s xattrs.test that called “rsync” instead of “$RSYNC”.
• Enhanced the release scripts to be able to handle a branch release and to do even more consistency checks on the files.