I used AI tools to do the grunt work because they are good at that.
This is something people complaining should remember. AI is good at some parts of the work of a software engineer: the grunt work.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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People pointing at new breakages are trying to say "No it isn't and here's the proof".
Repost of my reply elsewhere:
This guy is already retired, he wants to spend his days sailing and here we are bitching about rsync not being good enough while we all use if for free
Most of us won't be able to help code, fine.
But most of us could help with translations
Many of us could help with documentation
Some of us could contribute regularly with small financial donations
Some of us might have enough knowledge and expertise and experience to help code
Others could come up with other tasks that could be done.
The point is: rsync need more resources. Either we get him more resources or we STFU about the retired dev using AI. We can't have it both ways.
This whole debacle is making me extremely black pilled about open software in general. Just like cheap computing has died in recent years, I suspect non corporate free software is about to meet the same end to the acclaim of people who think they're doing a good thing for the world.
I think it's unreasonable to complain that the guy is not working enough for free.
I think it's reasonable to alert people that rsync is not being properly maintained anymore and to seek alternatives.
I would prefer the maintainer to announce publicly that he can't maintain the project anymore and is looking for help/someone to take over instead of breaking the project silently.
But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence? Your comment implies that tridge didn't call for help before, which is far from the truth.
This is thankless maintenance on critical software, not some *-arr toy project for hobbyist self-hosters.
https://github.com/rclone/rclone
https://github.com/restic/restic
https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison
The thing with old, critical software is that after some time people don't really want to dig through decades of C code and prefer to write something new using modern tools. Those projects get plenty of support because people actually do want to work on them. If no one wants to work on rsync than what the maintainer is doing now is just prolong it's agony a couple of years. I would say he should do the minimum work, announce end of life date and move on. People that need tools like rsync will develop something.
Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.
The trouble with some of those projects (e.g. unison and sun thing) is that they don't solve the same problem, not really.
A rewrite with modern tooling would be better done if it was incremental.
Also, having critical software depend on one guy is not safe. We should avoid that. If critical software depends on one guy it should be phased out.
Here are the percent of commits from the top committer in each repository you mentioned, as well as rsync, over the last 3 months:
- rsync: 99.0%
- restic: 93.2%
- rclone: 87.5%
- union: 82.9%
- syncthing: 74.4%
As you can see, each of this projects depends heavily on a single person, though to a lesser degree than rsync. That's just the nature of most open-source software.
Note that I excluded dependabot commits from the calculations and counted Claude commits as the lead developer for rsync
How I imagine this:
- rsync gets end of life date
- People that rely on rsync start looking for alternatives
- They try to switch and figure out what functionality is missing
- They contribute to some of the alternative to fill the gaps
For example, I'm about to setup some syncing for on homelab and I will not use rsync for that. That's why talking about the state of rsync is important. As I said, it's not about attacking the dev for not working hard enough. It's about long term planning.
Is that your assumption given that they're using AI? Because it's not at all what I have taken away from their article.
Is "not properly maintained anymore" your interpretation of them using AI? Or what do you base that on?
The whole story started because rsync stopped working for some users. That's "not properly maintained" in my books.
I don't know the degree to that, but bugs do happen occasionally either way as long as there are changes. In the article, they explain why the changes are necessary. Prioritizing security over no-change-stability seems reasonable and warranted.
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