Re: path = not supporting *

Sebastian Schleussner <[email protected]> writes:

> As far as I can see, all Unison settings accepting wildcards or regular 
> expressions, require PathSpec-type arguments that start with "Name", 
> "Path", "Regex", or "BelowPath".
> "path" is in another class together with "root", "include", "force", and 
> "prefer".
>
> Changing the "path" setting to do the same as "ignore" and so on would 
> break countless profiles in the wild.
> Changing the "path" setting to support wildcards without a keyword like 
> "Path" would introduce inconsistency into the syntax, and limit those who 
> want to use full regular expressions.
> Making the keyword optional would provoke strange behaviour/error messages 
> if someone does want to sync a path such as "Name"...
>
> One solution to avoid breaking backward compatibility would be to introduce 
> a new setting such as "consider" that takes a PathSpec.

Thanks for your analysis -- I find it is very helpful.

So we conclude that unison is functioning as documented.   And that
perhaps, we could so one of

  1) introduce a Path2 = that takes a PathSpec instead of a literal path.

  2) add the keyword to Path.  Because of your point that Path = Path would
  be ambiguous, make it a warning if there isn't one of the keywords, a
  space, and something more.   Make sure that one of keywords matches
  exactly the current semantics.

I sort of lean to the 2nd, but I am not sure it would be an overall win
for users in terms of coping cost for many vs benefit for a few.  And
even if we decide it would be good, someone who cares would have to
prepare a PR (that updates code, docs, tests, and is clean/rebased).

> Personally, I am quite happy with the 'reason-ability' of a list of 
> "ignore"s and "ignorenot"s.

Personally, I organize my files into dirs that I want to sync
(~/shared/foo, for various foo), and do not try to sync my homedir.  So
all of this path stuff bothers me zero.   I won't be working on it, and
am speaking above as maintainer where I try to balance what's good for
the entire set of users.

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