Comment 4 for bug 1896251

Thanks for the bug report, Mikko.

I confirmed that this bug happens on both Bionic and Focal, but doesn't happen (or at least doesn't happen in the same way) on Groovy.

Bear in mind that, when running this command using Groovy's rsync, I see:

$ rsync --delete-missing-args --files-from=list a b
file has vanished: "/tmp/rsync-bug/a/1/2"
WARNING: parent dir is absent in the file list: 1/2
default_perms_for_dir: sys_acl_get_file(1/2, ACL_TYPE_DEFAULT): No such file or directory, falling back on umask
rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred (code 24) at main.c(1330) [sender=3.2.3]

This is a different error from the one reported in the bug, and I think it's worth investigating whether it is another bug, or if it's just an expected error this time.

FWIW, the patch needed to be backport in order to fix the initial bug on Bionic/Focal rsync is:

commit af6118d98b3482cbcfc223bf2a0777bc19eccb02
Author: Wayne Davison <email address hidden>
AuthorDate: Sun Apr 26 18:02:17 2020 -0700
Commit: Wayne Davison <email address hidden>
CommitDate: Sun Apr 26 18:10:40 2020 -0700

    Allow a missing parent dir when --delete-missing-args was specified.