search for: rsync_command

Hi, I'd like to suggest a new feature to rsync. Problem: Currently, rsync generates a recursive list of file existing a the source directory, modifies this list by includes and excludes, and then copies these files. That's pretty good in most, but not all cases. I am mirroring a debian archive, but unfortunately, debian mixes all files of several distributions in a subtree /pool.

Is it possible to call rsync and tell it to use a filter file if it exists, but otherwise continue without errors? If I pass "--filter=. .rsync-filter", it will fail if .rsync-filter doesn't exist. I know you can pass "--filter=: /.rsync-filter" to search for filter files in each directory. That won't fail if there aren't any such files. But I'm only