I do not believe that it is a desirable target to mimic the default behavior of scp.
I my opinion, the default behavior of any file copy program must be to make exact copies of the sources.
I find it very annoying that all UNIX copying programs do not have this behavior and by default they will lose information.
Therefore I always use aliases for all copying commands (cp, scp, rsync etc.), so that by default they will make exact copies.
For example, to make exact copies rsync needs "--archive --xattrs --acls", and cp needs "--no-dereference --recursive --preserve=all". cp also needs to be compiled with enabled extended attributes, which many Linux distributions disable, otherwise you lose the extended attributes without any warning or error.
Another trap on Linux, which may prevent making exact file copies, is when tmpfs is used for /tmp and some file is copied through /tmp, e.g. for passing it to another user. A copy through tmpfs may lose extended attributes and it also may truncate the timestamps of some file systems.
I my opinion, the default behavior of any file copy program must be to make exact copies of the sources.
I find it very annoying that all UNIX copying programs do not have this behavior and by default they will lose information.
Therefore I always use aliases for all copying commands (cp, scp, rsync etc.), so that by default they will make exact copies.
For example, to make exact copies rsync needs "--archive --xattrs --acls", and cp needs "--no-dereference --recursive --preserve=all". cp also needs to be compiled with enabled extended attributes, which many Linux distributions disable, otherwise you lose the extended attributes without any warning or error.
Another trap on Linux, which may prevent making exact file copies, is when tmpfs is used for /tmp and some file is copied through /tmp, e.g. for passing it to another user. A copy through tmpfs may lose extended attributes and it also may truncate the timestamps of some file systems.