Re: bug in rsnapshot 1.2.1 due to change in /bin/cp 5.93

[Eric Blake]

> FC5 uses /bin/cp version 5.93, and this version doesn't like a trailing
> slash on the destination directory name.  /bin/cp v5.2.1 (the version on
> Fedora Core 3) used to accept it.  Looking at the man page, it appears
> version 5.93 can be made to use the old behavior by passing '-T' on the
> command line.  Vexingly, v5.2.1 doesn't like the -T option.  Examples:

Thanks for the bug report.  However, this issue has already come up in
the past:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-02/msg00069.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-11/msg00285.html

The consensus seemed to be that POSIX is ambiguous on what is
required, and that while cp should someday be fixed to either be
consistent across all platforms or to honor the semantics of the
underlying rename(2) syscall, no one was willing to delay 5.94
for such a patch.  So your issue is still present in coreutils 5.94
(the latest stable version).

All I can recommend now is that rsnapshot be patched to avoid
this portability trap of cp, since other platforms (such as Solaris
or BSD) have different rename semantics in this corner case.

-- 
Eric Blake