rsync recently began issuing "copying unsafe symlink" warnings with --verbose even if the file in question has not changed in any way. This pollutes the output so you can't easily see what *has* changed. for example, I update a web server tree which contains many symlinks to files outside the source tree on the source machine (and which are copied as plain files to the destination, as expected). Now every time I run rsync to do an update, I see a warning for every one of those files, even though nothing has changed in any way. So I'm requesting that rsync NOT issue that warning except when the destination file does not exist or is changing (i.e. content, permissions, or something) But NOT if nothing has changed at all. I'll attach a demo script which shows the problem (with rsync 3.1.1 on Ubuntu 14.10 64bit).
Created attachment 10497 [details] Demo script
A much more serious problem is that when "unsafe" symlinks are copied pursuant to the --copy-unsafe-links option, they are all treated as I/O ERRORS. This prevents --delete from ever working.
Sorry, please ignore comment#3 (there was so much noise from the warnings that I didn't see that one of the 100s of links was in fact broken, and thus the IO Error was legitimate).