Support for exclusion paths

There are cases where we want to match an entire directory but not certain subdirectories.

Instead of having to list each matching subdirectory, it would be nice to be able to exclude some paths from a match.

An example may be:

label1:
- match: "example1/**/*"
  exclude: ["example1/foo/*", "example1/bar/*"]

[damccorm]

This seems like a helpful idea! I think we probably should be able to do something like this, I want to be careful here though - I don’t want to break existing configurations, so I don’t want to change the syntax of the yml file.

I think a better approach might be to support ! as a negate pattern. So you’re example would look the following instead:

label1:
- "!example1/foo/*"
- "!example1/bar/*"
- "example1/**/*"

Probably, we’d want to evaluate sequentially until we find a pattern that matches. So that way we could even do something like:

label2:
- "!example2/foo/bar"
- "example2/foo/**/*"
- "!example2/**/*"
- "**/*"

The above example would not match example2/foo/bar/abc.txt, would match example2/foo/baz/abc.txt, would not match example2/notFoo/baz/abc.txt, and would match notExample2/foo/baz/abc.txt since the patterns are evaluated in order - I think this would be about as powerful as we can get.

Thoughts?

[jalaziz]

i’m trying to use this to match only if specific file is changed, but not if that specific file and another one are modified but dosn’t seem possible with this change.

the idea would be to add the label only if all the files match the pattern, is that possible?

@fluzzi discussion is taking place in #22. However, I think I can support your use case if the maintainers are willing to accept my map configuration proposal.

Your use case could be represented as:

label1:
- match: "example1/foo"
  exclude: ["example1/bar"]