Re: rsync to copy files?

[Volker Boerchers]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> * Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 02:16:37AM CEST:
> > On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Warren Young wrote:
> > >Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > >>
> > >>I have learned that using 'rsync' to copy files improves the install time 
> > >>quite dramatically for repeat installs. 
> *snip*
> > >Instead of chasing this solution, try patching autoconf to use 'cp -u' 
> > >instead of 'install'.
> > 
> > I was not aware of this cp option. It seems to be limited to GNU 
> > cp.  On Linux systems, or systems where GNU cp is available, this 
> > seems like a reasonable choice.
> 
> If you change the install semantics, please consider keeping the
> 'one install line echoed per file' rule.  Please also make the new
> behavior (e.g. not overwriting files with newer timestamp) optional,
> the default being the old behavior.  Otherwise, hard-to-debug
> failures could occur.

an easy way to replace 'install' is to overwrite the INSTALL variable 
temporarily (at least with gnu make):

  make INSTALL=myinstall install

where myinstall could be a little shell script that accomodates the
replacement to 'install', e.g. handles the commandline options in the
right way.

This way we regularly replace install by ln (hardlink) where possible
(same filesystem and partition) saving time and disk space.

Volker
-- 
Volker Börchers
TECON Systems AG, http://www.tecon.de