Excluded directories at rsync (was "--filter, missing in action")

[Teodor MICU]

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:32:37 +0200
Paul Slootman <paul+rsync at wurtel.net> wrote:
> --delete-excluded will screw this up.

Yes, this is why I don't use it. This is probably a bug because the
excluded directories with "- DIR/**" will became empty on all receivers
(SLAVE hosts). But with just "--delete" the excluded directories are not
synchronized with the MASTER host, which works as designed.

The annoying side effect is that on all SLAVE hosts I get some garbage
directories like "parent1" "parent2" .. that contains only the excluded
"DIR" directory. This is not desired because these "parent*" directories
were deleted on the MASTER host but cannot be deleted with rsync on the
SLAVE hosts because it contains one excluded directory named "DIR".

I'm searching for a solution/workaround to this problem but so far I don't
see any. I think a new parameter like "--delete-excluded-subdir" would be
needed to cover this case. This parameter should have no effect if the
"--delete" parameter was not given, but in conjunction with it should
delete all the directories that were deleted at the source (MASTER host)
even in the case that it contains some sub-directories that are on the
exclude list.

Any other idea?

Thanks