[rdiff-backup-users] Excluding folders and trailing slashes

[Ilari Scheinin]

I noticed slightly inconsistent behaviour while excluding folders. If  
you don't use a wildcard, it doesn't matter whether there is a  
trailing slash or not. But if you do have a wildcard, it does. It  
could be that this is expected behaviour and documented somewhere,  
but at least for me, it caused some extra head scratching. I am using  
rdiff-backup 1.1.9 and py-xattr 0.4 on Mac OS X 10.4.9.

Here's a demonstration:

This is what I am testing with.
$ ls -R test
foo

test/foo:
bar

test/foo/bar:
file

When I am not using wildcards with the --exclude, the trailing slash  
does not matter:
$ rdiff-backup --exclude test/foo/bar test backup1
$ rdiff-backup --exclude test/foo/bar/ test backup2

In both cases, "bar" gets excluded and the directories backup1/foo  
and backup2/foo are empty.

But if I do use a wildcard, there is a difference:
$ rdiff-backup --exclude "test/*/bar" test backup1
$ rdiff-backup --exclude "test/*/bar/" test backup2

Now, backup1/foo is empty like it is supposed to be, but backup2/foo  
is not:
$ ls backup2/foo
bar

On another note, nowdays that most of the new computers have multiple  
processor cores, how hard would it be to make rdiff-backup take  
advantage of it? It seems that in most cases the process is cpu  
bound, so I think it could make a difference, but I am afraid that it  
would require such major changes that it is practically out of the  
question at the moment?

Ilari