I'll second that!

Thanks for your post. This request has been added to the tracker:
Issue 528 – Configurable order of operations during synchronization

It would be awesome if synchronize had an option to control the order in which adds, modifications, and deletes (if enabled with -delete) are performed. Currently, it is possible to sequence deletes last by running synchronize without -delete and then again with -delete, but as far as I can tell there is no easy way to sequence adds and modifications with respect to each other, or to sequence deletes first or second.

In my case, I want to perform adds first, then modifications, then deletes. This is because updating my website involves adding and deleting .tar.bz2 files (which are large), and modifying .html files that link to the .tar.bz2 files. When adds, modifications, and deletes are unsequenced, this could cause broken links while the adds take about an hour to upload. I work around this by manually uploading the large files that I'm adding, then running synchronize.

Other users might want to sequence adds, modifications, and deletes in another order. For example, users who are close to running out of space may want to sequence deletes before modifications and adds.