rsync considered superior (was: Re: rsync vs. cvsup benchmarks)

[Rahul Siddharthan]

"Simon 'corecode' Schubert" <corecode at fs.ei.tum.de> wrote:

>Thank you for these thorough tests!  We finally have some hard numbers to
>work with.  I think it is obvious that rsync should be the preferred
>update mechanism if you want to download the cvs repository. 

To download, yes, to update, that's not so clear.  To repeat my
earlier mail: Vincent appears only to have installed a tarball of
recent (but not current) sources and used cvsup / rsync to update
them.  But to operate efficiently, cvsup needs checkout files, which
it would have only if it was run previously on those sources.  See the
FAQ:
    http://www.cvsup.org/faq.html
in particular, numbers 37 and 38:

      In order to update your files efficiently, CVSup needs to know
      what you've already got. It stores this information in files
      called "checkouts" files... If CVSup can't find a checkouts file
      that it needs, it falls back on other methods of determining
      which files you have. One such method is to compute checksums
      (MD5 file signatures) for each of your files, and use those to
      figure out which file revisions you have. This is perfectly
      safe, but it is inefficient. It slows down your update and also
      puts a heavier load on the server.

To compare cvsup minus checkout-files to rsync seems quite misplaced.
Most people will never use cvsup merely to download sources: they will
use it to keep them regularly up-to-date. 

Rahul