[Nottingham] mkisofs weirdness

[James Gibbon]

Last night, using mkisofs, I wrote a dvd image of a directory tree I
wanted to back up.  To my surprise, despite having excluded a huge chunk
of it (using -exclude-list), the iso was the same size as the whole
directory.  I repeated the exercise using -v (verbose), checking the
output - mkisofs had correctly confirmed my exclusion list and claimed
to be excluding the directories I had specified in the exclude file. 
Mounting the iso and nosing around confirmed that the files didn't
_appear_ to be present.

However, the iso was still massively larger than the files mkisofs had
claimed to have written, so I concluded that the exclude files _had_
actually been written to the iso in some inaccessible manner - they had
just been excluded from the directory listing.

As a workaround, I used tar on the directory tree somewhere else, using
tar's -X option, which does work properly, than ran mkisofs on the copy.  

But does anyone know how to get mkisofs to do the right thing?

Thanks,
James