cfengine 2.0.1 copy behaviour

[J . K . Wight]

The Reference manual states for copy: 

   If the master and image are directories then all of the child files
   *which are not directories* are copied from source to destination.

Given the examples at the end of the section, I expected to be able to
write:

copy:
     /etc   /etc include=auto* server=...

for instance, to keep automounter maps up to date.

However, I am finding that nothing gets copied unless recurse is set
to at least 1, and then I get empty directories created for each
subdirectory in /etc.

That's not how copy is supposed to behave, is it?

Jim