"glob" examples for include/exclude should be quoted to prevent unexpected behavior

[kkmuffme]

https://developer.wordpress.org/cli/commands/i18n/make-pot/

glob patterns can be used, i.e. --exclude=foo-*.php
Simple glob patterns can be used, i.e. --include=foo-*.php

The shell (tries to) glob this prematurely and this can lead to unexpected results if these exist in the current working directory. To prevent that and get the glob handling by wp cli, it would have to be --include="foo-*.php" ?

[swissspidy]

Wanna submit a PR with such doc improvements? :)

[kkmuffme]

I was about to and looked at the underlying code. That made me realize that the missing " aren't the only issue in the docs, but that the way the excludes/includes work is an incredibly unusal algorithm defying any logic seen anywhere for excludes/includes.

Why is this weird scoring algorithm used for it instead of just using either regular glob, ant or .gitignore patterns?

EDIT: e.g. due to the scoring, currently the order of excludes and includes matters if a path would match multiple excludes/includes, according to the docs leading/trailing / are ignored, but it looks like only leading / are ignored in all cases,...

[swissspidy]

In short: historical reasons. I think that evolved naturally because it used to be a very basic wildcard implementation that then turned into something bigger over time, but it was never intended to be 1:1 glob as you know it.

We could consider a breaking change update to use an existing glob library in the future, but that's a project on its own.

[unfulvio]

we ran in a similar issue concerning exclusion patterns... basically it is impossible to exclude certain paths unless regular globbing are implemented, especially when the include path also includes the main path, while we want to exclude some specific subdirs within that path

as an alternative, at least for exclusions, would be cool if wp cli supported a dotfile to skip a directory regardless of what --exclude says, maybe that would be a backwards compatible approach?