Andrew Tridgell, the co-inventor of rsync, announced that the third version of the product is about to be released.

Tridgell passed over the development of rsync to Martin Pool who then passed it to Wayne Davison who has been working on it for a few years. “My actual contributions to rsync have been very minor over the past few years”, said Tridgell.

Tridgell admits Davison has been more daring then himself in the development of rsync. “There were some features that users really asked for, that I thought ‘gosh if we put that in, then maintaining that feature will be really hard’.”

Some of these features include the in-place update and reducing memory overheads. “The memory overhead of rsync is not of the order of the number of files you’re transferring, instead it’s order 1 rather than order N which makes an enormous difference when you’ve got large datasets”, he said.

Tridgell says he’s been pleased with Davison’s work on rsync. “I’ve been delighted to stand at the side and applaud what he’s been doing”, he said.