Wildcard in rule pattern doesn't apply to subdirectories

[adityasaky]

What happened?

gittuf currently uses glob-style patterns. This means that file:foo/* will apply to all files in the foo/ directory but not in the foo/bar/ directory. The glob-style patterns are based off the upstream TUF specification but they're not ideal for gittuf. Instead, I propose we switch our patterns to align with gitignore. This should be a drop-in replacement. Note that with this change, file:foo/* will still not match other /, but we can at least support file:foo/**.

Relevant log output

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[adityasaky]

Thinking aloud, but I think what we really want is just fnmatch? No need of ** then, fnmatch doesn't special case directory separaters. It operates strictly on strings as well.

[JustinCappos]

So what would the behavior be in this case then?

[adityasaky]

I think fnmatch would meet the original expectation trivially. No need for **, * would match / supporting subdirectories as well.

[JustinCappos]

What if you don't want to match subdirectories? Is that use case important?

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 2:00 PM Aditya Sirish @.***> wrote:

I think fnmatch would meet the original expectation trivially. No need for **, * would match / supporting subdirectories as well.

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[adityasaky]

Do you mean where foo has three subdirectories a, b, c and you want a pattern to only apply to a and b and not c? fnmatch doesn't make this trivial (regex may be a better option here but I don't know if we want the complexity of regex). I want to note though that you could support this by explicitly defining a terminating rule for foo/c and then include a rule for foo/*. Either way, you're explicitly declaring the subdirectory you do not want to match.