feature request: add negation wildcard for paths

[zhijie-yang]

When slicing a package, wildcards are often used to match patterns. However, the current string pattern matching mechanism does not support negation patterns, which makes writing the slice definitions of Golang source packages cumbersome. An example would be a go package with embedded test cases, where people have to explicitly all the production source file names in the slice definition, in order not to include the test files with _test.go suffices.

[letFunny]

This is a nice idea for a future improvement thanks! Let's brainstorm a little bit to see if I understood you correctly, the example is:

where people have to explicitly all the production source file names in the slice definition, in order not to include the test files with _test.go suffices

If I understand you correctly you want to say something like take all files from /{cmd,internal,...}.go but do not take files that match *_test.go. Or in a more contrived example, the same Go repo contains several packages / commands which are independent, {pkg1, pkg2, internal, cmd, etc.} and we exclude test files. How would you do that with only negation? It seems to me like we would also need to combine patterns, not only negation.

[letFunny]

Just another idea, maybe it would be much simpler if we limited the scope to be a second tier filter. That is instead of complicating the glob patterns we may choose to include some "extra step" similar to what rockcraft does. This is just an idea for brainstorming but something like:

slices:
  bin:
    contents:
      /pkg/*.go:
          except: *_test.go
      /<some-other-paths>/:

We may choose to have richer syntax to allow more combinations of exclusions but the important point is that exclusions are not taken into account for conflict resolution. We would need more use-cases to see if this simplification is useful or not.