Weird problem with excludes

I am using SiteMesh 2.2.1. I ran into a weird problem when specifying
the excludes pattern for applying my sitemesh decorators in my
decorators.xml file like so:

<decorators defaultdir="/decorators">
    <decorator name="default" page="default.jsp">
        <pattern>/*</pattern>
    </decorator>
    <excludes>
        <pattern>/help/*</pattern>
    </excludes>
</decorators>

I use sitemesh in a very simple manner. All pages by default are
decorated by one default decoration scheme encoded in "default.jsp".
Every page has a help link on it and static HTML help files provided
by our documentation group are to be opened into separate browser
windows when these help links are clicked. I don't want the help files
to be decorated and they all are located in a separate "help" folder
within my deployed webapp.

Enough of the context, now on to the weird problem. The excludes
pattern defined above works to exclude all but one of the help files
from decoration. For some reason, sitemesh insists on decorating this
help file:

   /help/helpHome.htm

When I was trying to resolve this problem, I noticed that it was only
this one help file that was experiencing the problem. On a whim, I
changed the name of this one file to:

   /help/helpMainMenu.htm

And sitemesh started excluding it like all the other help files. I
swear that I am not making this up. The name change has worked around
my current problem. However, it might not be so easy to get around
this problem in the future. So, I'd really like to understand why it
was only that one file that the exclude pattern failed to match
somehow. I told you it was weird.

-- 
- Mike "Van" Riper
  [email protected]

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