The rsync program is an important and valued infrastructure tool on Linux systems. Many people depend on rsync for backups and other critical system operations. I certainly do – this blog is published by rsync! I prepare blog posts on my workstation and then run rsync to push updates to the server. rsync is old and widely depended-upon. Unfortunately, the rsync maintainer has been doing some major changes recently, using agentic AI in the process. They’ve been shoveling slop into what should be a mature and stable program. In the process, multiple rounds of bugs have been introduced. This key component has become untrustworthy and is a risk to system integrity and operations. I needed to take immediate action. I wanted to fall back my rsync installations to an older, trustworthy version. Note that there have been bug fixes and security fixes in recent rsync releases, so falling back trades re-introducing exposures for eliminating the current flaws. Falling back is not without its…
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