Before this change, bisync could only detect changes based on modtime, and
would refuse to run if either path lacked modtime support. This made bisync
unavailable for many of rclone's backends. Additionally, bisync did not account
for the Fs's precision when comparing modtimes, meaning that they could only be
reliably compared within the same side -- not against the opposite side. Size
and checksum (even when available) were ignored completely for deltas.
After this change, bisync now fully supports comparing based on any combination
of size, modtime, and checksum, lifting the prior restriction on backends
without modtime support. The comparison logic considers the backend's
precision, hash types, and other features as appropriate.
The comparison features optionally use a new --compare flag (which takes any
combination of size,modtime,checksum) and even supports some combinations not
otherwise supported in `sync` (like comparing all three at the same time.) By
default (without the --compare flag), bisync inherits the same comparison
options as `sync` (that is: size and modtime by default, unless modified with
flags such as --checksum or --size-only.) If the --compare flag is set, it will
override these defaults.
If --compare includes checksum and both remotes support checksums but have no
hash types in common with each other, checksums will be considered only for
comparisons within the same side (to determine what has changed since the prior
sync), but not for comparisons against the opposite side. If one side supports
checksums and the other does not, checksums will only be considered on the side
that supports them. When comparing with checksum and/or size without modtime,
bisync cannot determine whether a file is newer or older -- only whether it is
changed or unchanged. (If it is changed on both sides, bisync still does the
standard equality-check to avoid declaring a sync conflict unless it absolutely
has to.)
Also included are some new flags to customize the checksum comparison behavior
on backends where hashes are slow or unavailable. --no-slow-hash and
--slow-hash-sync-only allow selectively ignoring checksums on backends such as
local where they are slow. --download-hash allows computing them by downloading
when (and only when) they're otherwise not available. Of course, this option
probably won't be practical with large files, but may be a good option for
syncing small-but-important files with maximum accuracy (for example, a source
code repo on a crypt remote.) An additional advantage over methods like
cryptcheck is that the original file is not required for comparison (for
example, --download-hash can be used to bisync two different crypt remotes with
different passwords.)
Additionally, all of the above are now considered during the final --check-sync
for much-improved accuracy (before this change, it only compared filenames!)
Many other details are explained in the included docs.
Before this change, integration tests often could not be run on backends with
differing features from the local system that goldenized them. In particular,
differences in modtime precision, checksum support, and encoding would cause
false positives. After this change, the tests more accurately account for the
features of the backend being tested, which allows us to see true positives
more clearly, and more meaningfully assess whether a backend is supported.
Refactored the case / unicode normalization logic to be much more efficient,
and fix the last outstanding issue from #7270. Before this change, we were
doing lots of for loops and re-normalizing strings we had already normalized
earlier. Now, we leave the normalizing entirely to March and avoid
re-transforming later, which seems to make a large difference in terms of
performance.
Before this change, --resync was handled in three steps, and needed to do a lot
of unnecessary work to implement its own --ignore-existing logic, which also
caused problems with unicode normalization, in addition to being pretty slow.
After this change, it is refactored to produce the same result much more
efficiently, by reducing the three steps to two and letting ci.IgnoreExisting
do the work instead of reinventing the wheel.
The behavior and sync order remain unchanged for now -- just faster (but see
the ongoing lively discussions about potential future changes in #5681!)
Before this change, Bisync sometimes normalized NFD to NFC and sometimes
did not, causing errors in some scenarios (particularly for users of macOS).
It was similarly inconsistent in its handling of case-insensitivity.
There were three main places where Bisync should have normalized, but didn't:
1. When building the list of files that need to be transferred during --resync
2. When building the list of deltas during a non-resync
3. When comparing Path1 to Path2 during --check-sync
After this change, 1 and 3 are resolved, and bisync supports
--no-unicode-normalization and --ignore-case-sync in the same way as sync.
2 will be addressed in a future update.
