Request enhancement to pattern matching for packagingIncludes/packagingExcludes functionality (regular expressions?)

Since the warSourceIncludes/warSourceExcludes parameters no longer works on jars - only on source files, this issue is now about packagingIncludes/packagingExcludes.

We are also very interested in resolving this issue.
We have some jars which should be of "system-provided" scope (1. have systemPath property, because these jars are legacy and out of any repository; 2. not be included into war, because we have several instances of this war and jars are using native code, so only one instance of jar can be loaded, which should be in container's lib directory).
packagingExcludes seemed to be the solution we need, but we cannot force it to work properly. Actually even specifying full name doesn't work.

I need this too. My use case:

I want to exclude log4j-<version>.jar but keep the log4j-over-slf4j-<version>.jar...

I have attached a patch named maven-war-plugin-2.1.1-NM that adds the following feature to this plugin:
the mutually exclusive (only if set to true) tags:
<regexInPackagingSelectionAllowed>true</regexInPackagingSelectionAllowed>
<negationInPackgingAllowed>true</negationInPackgingAllowed>
that modify the way the values of packagingIncludes and packagingExcludes are handled.

The tag regexInPackagingSelectionAllowed can be viewed as replacing SelectorUtils.match(pattern,testedString) by Pattern.compile(pattern).matcher(testedString).matches() for the interpretation of packagingIncludes/Excludes

the tag <negationInPackgingAllowed> permit the usage of the ! operator in the packagingIncludes/Excludes. Let me give you an example to illustrate how it works;

The jar in WEB-INF/lib before filetering:
cumulostratus-1.1.jar (declared as optional pulled by stratus)
stratus-1.1.CITRUS.jar (pulled stratus as it is a dependancies)

<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.1.1-NM</version>
<configuration >                    
  <negationInPackagingSelectionAllowed>true</negationInPackagingSelectionAllowed>
  <packagingExcludes>**/*.jar,!**/*.CITRUS.jar</packagingExcludes>
</configuration>

The jar in WEB-INF/lib after filtering:
stratus-1.1.CITRUS.jar

this patched version is actually running my integration build code, I would like feedback upon it

the patch file name is maven-war-plugin-2.1.1-NM.patch

Please tell me how to proceed to have it reviewed and integrated into your trunk if it solved others people needs.

Ideally that patch would be somewhere in plexus but i only needed it in the war with taglibs that must be present in WEB-INF/lib and I am a partisan of the minimal impacted dependencies approach to patch outside of major version.

@Vincent Massol I don't know if will it help but with my patch you are supposed to be able to express it that way :

<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.1.1-NM</version>
<configuration >                    
  <negationInPackagingSelectionAllowed>true</negationInPackagingSelectionAllowed>
  <packagingExcludes>!**/log4j-*.jar,**/log4j-over-slf4j-*.jar</packagingExcludes>
</configuration>

If you still need it and you want have try it let's me know, and if you need help I will probably be available tomorrow around 18:00UTC.

edit: I read it back ward sorry about the multiple post

Thanks Nicolas.

I had found a very bad workaround (but working):

          </webResources>
          <!-- - Make sure we exclude JCL and LOGJ4 since we want all logging to go through SLF4J
               - Exclude xwiki-platform-olcore because it's included in xwiki-platform-legacy-oldcore
               - Excluded to prevent conflict in the patched version of Rhino used by yuicompressor used for JSX.
                 See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6151 for more details.

               Note: We use ?????? because we need to exclude log4j-1.2.16 but keep log4j-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar
                     See http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MWAR-81
          -->
          <packagingExcludes>
            WEB-INF/lib/xwiki-platform-oldcore-*.jar,WEB-INF/lib/batik-js-*.jar,WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-*.jar,WEB-INF/lib/log4j-??????.jar
          </packagingExcludes>

That the workaround that motivating myself to write that patch since I moved from atrocities like that:

<packagingExcludes combine.self="override">
**/A*.jar,**/B*.jar,**/C*.jar,**/M*.jar,**/O*.jar,
**/*P*.jar,**/R*.jar,**/a*.jar,**/b*.jar,**/c*.jar,
**/d*.jar,**/f*.jar,**/k*.jar,**/i*.jar,**/j*.jar,
**/l*.jar,**/m*.jar,**/r*.jar,**/sa*.jar,**/se*.jar,
**/v*.jar,**/x*.jar,
<!--  to exclude struts patched for RAD but not the lib's patched for our prod environment that's ends with .SIRUS-->
**/Struts-Layout.jar,**/struts-menu.jar,**/struts.jar 
</packagingExcludes>

to

<packagingExcludes>**/*.jar,!**/*.SIRUS.jar</packagingExcludes>        

I like this feature, but I think that the configuration should be done differently.

The approach in the patch isn't open to extension by other potential implementations of matchers. May I suggest a single String parameter containing the name for the matching strategy implementation. We could have packagingMatchingStrategy=standard or packagingMatchingStrategy=normal for the current behavior, then packagingMatchingStrategy=regexp and packagingMatchingStrategy=negatableRegexp for the new features.

I will implements your suggestion later this week, or in the beginning the next week, thank you for the feedback !!!

By the way the negation is not currently applicable on the regex so the options will be standard,negatableStandard and regex

I did not submit negatable RegExes as it introduce a lot's of edges cases, and I do not want to figure them all .... Example: how do you handle that an exclusion expression like that :

 <packagingMatchingStrategy>negatableRegexp</packagingMatchingStrategy>
 <packagingExclude>!(?sm)(?!struts)(\w[0-9\-])+.*\.jar,.*\.jar</packagingExclude>

Have a look at:
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/advanced-descriptor-topics.html

IIRC, this include/exclude stuff is provided by a plexus component and it might already work

@Joerg Schaible, I will use the plexus component under the hood, and document it in my next patch version. Thank you

This is what I mean: You don't have to patch anything, it already works (at least tested with 2.1.1)! I can use this without any problems to exclude files with log4j in their names:

<packagingExcludes>%regex[.*log4j.*]</packagingExcludes>

Thanks a lot Joerg! That was very useful. I was able to write:

          <!-- - Exclude JCL and LOG4J since we want all logging to go through SLF4J. Note that we're excluding
                 log4j-<version>.jar but keeping log4j-over-slf4j-<version>.jar
               - Exclude xwiki-platform-olcore because it's already included in xwiki-platform-legacy-oldcore
               - Exclude batik-js to prevent conflict with the patched version of Rhino used by yuicompressor used for
                 JSX. See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6151 for more details.
          -->
          <packagingExcludes>
            WEB-INF/lib/xwiki-platform-oldcore-*.jar,
            WEB-INF/lib/batik-js-*.jar,
            WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-*.jar,
            %regex[WEB-INF/lib/log4j-(?!over-slf4j).*.jar]
          </packagingExcludes>

Which is much nicer than what I had before

documentations changes and a new Junit test named testSimpleWarPackagingExcludeWithIncludesRegEx

I have added a Junit test to reflect this capability and updated the documentation, I hope that this will make it in the next release, as this is too much of an useful feature to remain undocumented and untested! Thank you again Joerg Schaible

Documentation patch added in r1203638, thanks!

Added documentation about an undocumented feature that solves the problem.