[Discuss] mirroring with rsync

[Alan W. Irwin]

SourcForge no longer offer tarball backups of project CVS repositories.
Instead, the new backup procedure involves rsync.  Here is the syntax they
recommend for (say) the plplot project:

rsync -av rsync://plplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/plplot/* .

>From reading the man page that doesn't seem quite right to me.  First as a
matter of style I name the destination directory a specific name rather than
just using the current directory.  Also, I want to do more than just
copy; I want to mirror so that deletes of files in the SF repo get reflected
in the local plplot_mirror tree.  Thus, here is the final command I
came up with:

rsync -av --delete \
rsync://plplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/plplot/* plplot

to be run once per week or so followed by

tar zcf plplot.tar.gz_DATE plplot

to take a backup snapshot of CVS (where DATE is the current date, e.g.,
20060603).

I am just an rsync newbie so I would appreciate confirmation/commentary on the
"final" rsync command above since it differs from what SourceForge recommends.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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