when doing rsync -av and changing group fails, does it give up changing the RWX attributes as well?

[jringoot]

I am doing a rsync as a user and changing the group at the destination fails with
rsync: [receiver] chgrp "somepath/somfile" failed: Operation not permitted (1)
but the rights are not applied either, they should be 644, as set also by umask (0022) on the destination
but become 600
the copyin user can get the wished permissions by doing a
cp -a
or a
chmod 644 on the destination files

if the user / group can't be changed, gives rsync then up for the remainder of the metadata?
tried with version 3.2.5, 3.2.7 and 3.3.0-29, same result.