[jsdl-wg] Wildcards in data staging elements

[Donal K. Fellows]

Bernd Schuller wrote:
> what is the opinion on using JSDL DataStaging elements that contain wildcards?
> Or even something more powerful such as filesets with includes and excludes,
> as in Apache Ant?

I've been tending to think in terms of "ship this whole directory tree",
which doesn't need (explicit) wildcards, and which permits all sorts of
interesting behind-the-scenes optimizations. One problem with wildcards
is that they can sometimes lead to unexpected results; I can remember
someone creating a file called '-f' in a globally-writeable directory
once and getting some very strange complaints from the sysadmins. :-)
This is why JSDL as written in the spec does not have any wildcards
within it. (If it did, they'd *not* be shell-like, but rather XML-like.)

Donal.