Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team • Hacker News Board

Re: Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team

#191

Post by coatmatter » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #189

asdsg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I also don't know how license critical distributions like Debian can even ship rsync now because it contains a) laundered code and b) Tridgell cannot claim copyright over the Claude additions. So rsync should be pinned to an older version and just get security updates.

Yeah. Pretty discouraging particularly since I have always associated Tridgell with high-quality code.

> Posted Apr 8, 2024 0:29 UTC (Mon) by tridge (subscriber, #26906) [Link] (27 responses)

> [...]"I have often worked on the boundary of free and proprietary software, right from when I was dosemu maintainer for a while, to Samba and many other projects. I make all my projects open, usually GPLv3, but I don't mind using closed tools to help me work more efficiently, even though I am creating free software myself. I know some people take a stronger stance and refuse to use any closed tools at all. That is a great choice if that is what you want to do. It isn't how I work, and it never has been."

https://lwn.net/Articles/968732/ "Tridge returns to rsync [Posted April 6, 2024 by jzb]"

Re: Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team

#192

Post by Double_a_92 » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

neves wrote: post #177

Why do they need to reimplement a robust piece of difference as rsync?

To make it have a different license which can be used in closed-source projects.

Re: Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team

#193

Post by JdeBP » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 8:09 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #126

hilsdev wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use a trailing slash on the source it copies from the directory, if you omit the trailing slash it copies the directory itself. AFAIK this is pretty standard across POSIX tools

It's not, for example cp -R doesn't change behavior on the basis of a trailing slash on directory names.

Indeed. This is one of the differences between the Unix and the MS/PC/DR-DOS command-line world. In the latter, recognizing empty final pathname components actually did become a way of differentiating such situations. I wrote a set of DOS and OS/2 tools in the 1990s, including COPY and MOVE commands, that had this very behaviour. I wasn't alone.