hep-gc/repoman — Issue #61: Investigate the replacement of exclude_dirs and sysdirs_emptied
Author: crlb
Created: 2011-12-07 22:35:19+00:00
State: open

The repoman config file entries 'exclude_dirs' and 'sysdirs_emptied' are confuging, not well understood, and a little ambiguous. For example, what is the difference between 'sysdirs_emptied: /dev' and 'exclude_dirs: /dev/*'? The following IM discussion captures the thoughts that inspired this issue:

(01:50:44 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: I liked the idea of getting rid of emptied_dirs and processing the exclude_dirs to do what the user expects.
(01:52:13 PM) Andre: The rsync command already has support for exclude directives containing patterns. I don't really know why we didn't use that approach from the start; there is probably a reason...
(01:53:00 PM) Andre: having only 1 parameter, generic enough to work with both files and directories, would be the best approach I think. Something like "--excludes"
(01:53:57 PM) Andre: there is probably some obscure reasons why we didn't simply go with the rsync-provided expressions.
(01:56:28 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: The rsync excludes can be a little difficult,
(01:56:53 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: basically, I think you get one regular expression and then you have to use --exclude-from
(01:57:13 PM) Andre: well I think it might have been by trying to simplify it for the end users that we actually made it very unuserfriendly in the end
(01:57:38 PM) Andre: I'll have to read up on rsync exclude syntax... I don't remember...
(01:58:01 PM) Andre: maybe that should be something we tackle once this first round of CLI changes are applied and merged into master?
(02:00:24 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: So, my thinking is that we should just have an 'exclude-from' parameter with comma separated strings, we write that to a repoman-rsyn.conf file and the rsync command has something like 'rsync --exclude-from=repoman-rsync.conf...'
(02:02:41 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: The man page could just the refer them to the rsync manpage for the format of each of the strings.
(02:04:08 PM) Andre: yeah, that could be a possibility
(02:04:24 PM) Andre: maybe we should open an issue for this and copy/paste this IM conversation to it so that we do not forget?
(02:07:03 PM) crlb@uvic.ca: The rsync man page has a section entitled "INCLUDE/EXCLUDE PATTERN RULES" that we could refer people to.