No way to escape metacharacters in globs

[quasicomputational]

The section of Cabal's manual describing file globbing does not cover how to escape metacharacters. It ought to say how to include a file with a literal * in its name.

[23Skidoo]

I'm actually not sure whether that is at all supported.

[gbaz]

cc @mitchellwrosen

[mitchellwrosen]

I'm not sure either but I can find out for you in a couple hours.

[mitchellwrosen]

It's not possible to include a file with a literal * in its name:

cabal/Cabal/Distribution/Simple/Utils.hs

Line 1133 in b36cf3c

_ | '*' `elem` filepath -> Nothing

[mitchellwrosen]

Actually, I thing I'm wrong. The code looks like it would accept a filename such as

foo.*.txt

(but the user probably intended for * to be treated like a glob in this case).

[mitchellwrosen]

Whoops, forget that last comment, I read the code wrong. I confused filepath for filepath'. The code is confusing, heh.

[quasicomputational]

In which case I am going to turn this into a feature request, since I'd think that someone, somewhere will have a good reason to include a file with an asterisk in its path; it'll also free preprocessors like hpack of the duty to check for that special case.