on at least freebsd, symlinks have settable
 times/perms as well as u/g/flags.

true, use of a symlink is time/perm/u/g/flag agnostic
 however, unsynchronized time/perm do cause problems
 elsewhere on systems that have the above syscalls. ie:
  1 - find <path> -newer <stampfile> -ls
   print if any/all types, rather than a single, are newer
  2 - find <path> -perm +7022 -ls
   print if any/all types, rather than a single, are not isolated

rsync created slinks earn the time of the symlink(2) call
 by rsync. further, an lutimes(2) run elsewhere against the
 slink is not picked up by later rsync runs. both break ex1.
similarly, rsync ignores both umask and src perms when
 creatings slinks. neither are updated in later runs. breaking ex2.

rm -r ./dstdir
srcdir:
lrwxrwx---  1 u  g  1 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 a -> b
-rw-r-----  1 u  g  0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 b
prw-rw----  1 u  g  0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 fifo
srwxrwx---  1 u  g  0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 sockfile

umask 0022
[root] rsync -axv --delete ./srcdir/ ./dstdir/
dstdir:
lrwxrwxrwx  1 u  g    1 Jul 24 03:30:36 2005 a -> b
-rw-r-----  1 u  g    0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 b
prw-rw----  1 u  g    0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 fifo
srwxrwx---  1 u  g    0 Jul 24 03:29:58 2005 sockfile

last time i looked this required passing the
source stat structure through to the affected
rsync functions and extending the fn to use it
with the above syscalls, perhaps ifdef'd if not
present.

reply only to bugzilla/rsync list, thx.