Shallow Thoughts : : Mar

Zoom Pops Up a Window for ... RawTherapee??

I've been annoyed for some time by the way that Zoom, when it finishes processing a recording after a meeting, pops up a ... Raw Therapee window??

RawTherapee is a program for handling RAW image files, the kind that many digital cameras can generate but that most image apps can't read. It's a fine program. But it's not a file manager, nor is it a video player. It makes absolutely no sense to pop it up to handle a video file. And it's very slow to start up, so I would leave a Zoom meeting, and then half a minute later this weird window would pop up for no apparent reason.

I've seen a few other programs, like wine, pop up these RawTherapee windows. I've been trying for many months to figure out why this happens, and I've finally found the answer, and a fix.

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Rsync: Combining Includes and Excludes

I back up my computer to a local disk (well, several redundant local disks) using rsync. (I don't particularly trust cloud providers, and in any case our internet connection is very slow, especially for upload, so waiting hours while the entire contents of my disk uploads isn't appealing.)

To save space and time, I have script that includes a list of files and directories I don't need to back up: browser cache directories, object files, build directories, generated files like thumbnails, large video files, downloaded source, and so on.

I also have a list of files I do want to back up even though they'd otherwise be excluded. For instance, I sometimes have local changes in my GIMP source directory, outsrc/gimp-master/gimp/, even though most of outsrc doesn't need to be backed up. Or /blog/tags/build in my local mirror of the shallowsky website, even though I have a rule that says directories named build shouldn't usually be backed up.

I've been using rsync's --include and --exclude to handle this. But I discovered yesterday that I'd been using them wrong, and some things I thought were getting backed up, weren't. It took some reading and experimenting before I figured out how these rsync flags actually work — which doesn't seem to be well explained anywhere.

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