Deployment with rsync fails with "This rsync lacks old-style --compress due to its external zlib"

Deploying a project to remote Linux machine using rsync fails with the message:

rsync: This rsync lacks old-style --compress due to its external zlib. Try -zz

I'm using Linux Mint 19.1. Rsync shows the version 3.1.2.

As a workaround, I have created a small shell script named "rsync" which modifies the arguments passed to rsync. Prepending the directory where this script lives to the PATH environment variable makes Qt execute the script instead the original rsync program.

The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/rsync "$1" "$2" "${3//-avz/-avzz}" "$4" "$5"