Document the behaviour of _match_one_pattern in some detail

The possibilities are complicated enough that I didn't want to make
changes without having a complete description of what it actually
accepts/matches. Note that this text documents current behaviour, not
necessarily the behaviour we want. Some of this is undocumented and may
not be intended.
pull/12057/head
Abhijit Menon-Sen 9 years ago
parent fa6ffa1dbd
commit 73f10de386

@ -228,9 +228,40 @@ class Inventory(object):
def _match_one_pattern(self, pattern):
"""
Takes a single pattern (i.e., not "p1:p2") and returns a list of
matching host names. Does not take negatives or intersections
into account.
Takes a single pattern and returns a list of matching host names.
Ignores intersection (&) and exclusion (!) specifiers.
The pattern may be:
1. A regex starting with ~, e.g. '~[abc]*'
2. A shell glob pattern with ?/*/[chars]/[!chars], e.g. 'foo'
3. An ordinary word that matches itself only, e.g. 'foo'
The pattern is matched using the following rules:
1. If it's 'all', it matches all hosts in all groups.
2. Otherwise, for each known group name:
(a) if it matches the group name, the results include all hosts
in the group or any of its children.
(b) otherwise, if it matches any hosts in the group, the results
include the matching hosts.
This means that 'foo*' may match one or more groups (thus including all
hosts therein) but also hosts in other groups.
The built-in groups 'all' and 'ungrouped' are special. No pattern can
match these group names (though 'all' behaves as though it matches, as
described above). The word 'ungrouped' can match a host of that name,
and patterns like 'ungr*' and 'al*' can match either hosts or groups
other than all and ungrouped.
If the pattern matches one or more group names according to these rules,
it may have an optional range suffix to select a subset of the results.
This is allowed only if the pattern is not a regex, i.e. '~foo[1]' does
not work (the [1] is interpreted as part of the regex), but 'foo*[1]'
would work if 'foo*' matched the name of one or more groups.
Duplicate matches are always eliminated from the results.
"""
if pattern.startswith("&") or pattern.startswith("!"):

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