[Python-Dev] A smarter shutil.copytree ?

[Isaac Morland]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, Steven Bethard wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have submitted a patch for review here: http://bugs.python.org/issue2663
>>
>>  glob-style patterns or a callable (for complex cases) can be provided
>>  to filter out files or directories.
>
> I'm not a big fan of the sequence-or-callable argument. Why not just
> make it a callable argument, and supply a utility function so that you
> can write something like::
>
>    exclude_func = shutil.excluding_patterns('*.tmp', 'test_dir2')
>    shutil.copytree(src_dir, dst_dir, exclude=exclude_func)

Even if a glob pattern filter is considered useful enough to be worth 
special-casing, the glob capability should also be exposed via something 
like your excluding_patterns constructor and additionally as a function 
that can be called by another function intended for use as a callable 
argument.

If it is not, then doing something like "files matching these glob 
patterns except for those matching this non-glob-expressible condition and 
also those files matching this second non-glob-expressible condition" 
becomes painful because the glob part essentially needs to be 
re-implemented.

Isaac Morland			CSCF Web Guru
DC 2554C, x36650		WWW Software Specialist