Exclude regular expression path should be OS neutral

The regular expression in the exclude property of a loader configuration can be used to exclude file paths, but the paths provided to the regular expressions are operating system dependent, e.g. on Windows the paths are in the form of “a\b\c” and on Unix-based operating systems “a/b/c”. This makes writing correct regular expressions more difficult (and especially to test them).

My proposal is to always supply paths in the Unix style to the regular expression (e.g. “a/b/c”), and to document this clearly.

[rjgotten]

@bebraw Any specific reason for closing this with a blunt ‘fix it yourself’?

To have projects handled correctly cross-platform, one needs to take care to write excludes either with obnoxiously bloated regexes like

exclude : /(?:\/|\\)excluded(?:\/|\\)path-segment(?:\/|\\)/

or use the function syntax everywhere with custom path normalization strewn in, e.g.

exclude : (path) => /\/excluded\/path-segment\//i.test(makeOSNeutral(path))

Is that the kind of burden you should be placing on authors?

Webpack itself is in a position to offer a ‘OS-neutral’ POSIX path here — What users expect is being offered here in 99.999…% percent of all cases to begin with… — which will still be *nix-compatible and shouldn’t break the status quo.

Imho it’s downright negligent to do nothing and tell users to fix it themselves. Webpack is complicated enough without latent bugs being introduced into build configurations by implicit OS dependencies…

[watjurk]

Hi, any update on this issue?