The '--pattern' option to svndumpfilter exclude/include was introduced
in Subversion 1.7 by http://svn.apache.org/r880381 (cc: Brane):
[[[
$ svndumpfilter --help exclude
[...]
--pattern : Treat the path prefixes as file glob patterns.
]]]
We don't say what sort of glob patterns it accepts, even in the Book
[1]. In particular, for a customer's use case, I would like to know
whether it supports matching a variable number of path elements, for
which a '/**/' syntax is typically used.
Its implementation uses svn_cstring_match_glob_list() which doesn't say
either. The implementation of that uses apr_fnmatch(flags=0).
apr_fnmatch is documented. In particular it says '*' matches "Any
sequence of zero or more characters". (We are *not* giving the flag
APR_FNM_PATHNAME "Slash must be matched by slash".)
So the particular answer I was looking for is that '*' will cross
multiple path elements:
[[[
$ svndumpfilter exclude --pattern '*/alpha'
Excluding prefix patterns:
'/*/alpha'
[...]
Dropped 2 nodes:
'/foo/alpha'
'/foo/bar/alpha'
]]]
(I noticed a suboptimal edge case: the above example doesn't match the
path '/alpha', because the implementation adds a leading slash to the
specified pattern, making '/*/alpha', and then insists on matching both
slashes literally.)
- Julian
[1]
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.ref.svndumpfilter.html#svn.ref.svndumpfilter.sw.pattern
