rsync filters

[Hal Burgiss]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:09:53PM -0700, Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 13:34 -0400, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> 
> > What really does not make sense to me, is that I have excluded all toplevel
> > directories. Yet there is different behavior from some as compared to others.
> > Eg, /bin wants to be deleted, /sys does not. Yet, they are specified in
> > *identical* syntax. 
> 
> Another possibility is the way -F works.  It looks for .rsync-filter
> files in each merged directory.  I'd see if there are any
> extraneous .filter-rules files lying around.  It appears you really want
> a single configuration file with all your exclude rules.  You can use
> the --exclude-from=FILE for this purpose or if you want the more general
> --filter syntax you can use the "merge" filter rule to point to a single
> filtering file.

I would certainly prefer one master configuration file. And it does act like
it is finding other filter files and acting on those. But, I can't find them.
This is a brand new installation and there hasn't been much time to muck it up
yet. 

So I've punted, and  what I've tried that partially works is
--exclude-from=excludes and --include-from=includes. This is working much more
predictably. The excludes works just as specified. The problem then was 
the includes are trumped by the excludes, so if I exclude /etc, trying to
include /etc/apache2/ is a no go. And specifying only --include-from, does not
seem to do any exclusions, so you get everything no matter whats in the
includes-from file. And lastly I tried --files-from=, which seems to strike a
nice balance excluding by default and only including what's in the config
file, and probably will get me over the hump.

Thanks.

-- 
Hal