[Duplicity-talk] Why do we have --include-filelist (as opposed to just globbing)?

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Hi all,

We've had a couple of bugs recently that only affect
--include/exclude-filelist but not --include/exclude-globbing-filelist.
One reason for this is that the code paths for the two different types
of filelists are separate in selection.py. I have been contemplating
trying to simplify this file a bit to keep things together until the
globs are interpreted. Before I do that, I wanted to check that there is
actually a use case for filelists that *aren't* globbing. I have often
used globbing filelists for normal paths without issues. The only
advantage that I can see in a non-globbing filelist would be if you had
filenames that had globbing characters in them, but we probably want a
way to escape such characters in globbing filelists anyway (if there
isn't already), as otherwise people with such files couldn't take
advantage of the benefits of globbing filelists.

I'm wondering if the more sensible answer is to essentially get rid of
include and exclude filelists altogether (we could obviously redirect
the option for the short term etc. and may want to rename globbing
filelists to just be filelists if there aren't any others).

I would be interested in your thoughts.

Kind regards,

Aaron