glob patterns for data_files

Would be great to be able to use glob patterns for data_files, so that one can write something like this:

[options.data_files]
share/myapp/doc = doc/*.md

This would be consistent with the way package_data works.

[eli-schwartz]

The only invalid path on Unix is a null byte (and “/” cannot exist in filenames but validly denotes a directory separator).

It’s theoretically possible but highly unlikely people wanted a literal asterisk in their file names, but by the same token that “:” is illegal on Windows, and in fact also illegal even on Unix if you happen to be using fat32 or NTFS without the POSIX namespace (the restriction is part of the filesystem spec)…

… the asterisk is also illegal in filenames on Windows (and at the filesystem layer on fat32 and NTFS).

So, such code depending on literal asterisks would unexpectedly fail on Windows, and also on that one person’s USB drive used for copying around a personal python environment from Unix system to Unix system.

One could argue backwards compatibility with something inherently broken is not such an important priority, and even if someone did need that behavior, the asterisk would simply expand to multiple files including the one with the literal asterisk. So the package would collect too many files, but at least the desired file would in fact be there.

If we want to make it super unlikely for anyone to ever stumble across this by using some prefix marker like option 1, I don’t think ::glob:: provides additional utility over glob: which would have symmetry with existing directives like file:, attr:, find:, and find_namespace:.

[eli-schwartz]

Well, @pganssle’s concern was, I think, that people might be using the new directive and actually mean it to be a literal filename instead of a directive… the question is whether that’s a practical concern. So yeah, relatively safe.

Thanks for doing the legwork of actually implementing this!