[Cc]ache* should not be in default exclusion list

[Richard Ayotte]

I just had a drive failure got bitten by this one. A few of the projects that I was working on such as Drupal and Dojo Toolkit have files named cache.js and cache.inc and of course they were excluded.

Maybe a less greedy or more specific pattern could be used instead.

[Tom Metro (tmetro+ubuntu)]

> files named cache.js and cache.inc...were excluded.

How about a pattern that only matched directories, instead of files?

[Richard Ayotte (rich-ayotte)]

Directories wouldn't have save me either. Here's what Dojo looks like.

./library/dojo/tests/cache
./library/dojo/tests/cache/object.html
./library/dojo/tests/cache/regular.html
./library/dojo/tests/cache/sanitized.html

A more conservative approach is probably better. Maybe we could give the users the option with a warning or we can start collect a list of more precise paths that we absolutely know are cache/tmp files?

[Germar (germar)]

That list could get quite long. But lets give it a try. Here is what I could imagine right now. Please add if you know more locations

.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache
.thunderbird/*/Cache
.cache
.opera/cache

Regards,
Germar

[Richard Ayotte (rich-ayotte)]

That's a good start. Could the value of the environment variable $XDG_CACHE_HOME be used somehow? It's part of the XDG Base Directory Specification. http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

[Germar (germar)]

Neither Debian nor Ubuntu make use of XDG_CACHE_HOME. Would've been too easy ;)

[Richard Ayotte (rich-ayotte)]

You're right. I just had a look at /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults (on 12.10) and it doesn't contain any XDG variables. Maybe I should file another bug that.

I'd be happy with the directories that you listed for now.

[Sparhawk (sparhawkthesecond)]

FWIW the Firefox cache is now at ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox for me.

[Germar (germar)]

This is the new default exclude in 1.1
[ '.gvfs', '.cache/*', '.thumbnails*', '[Tt]rash*', \
'*.backup*', '*~', '.dropbox*', '/proc/*', '/sys/*', \
'/dev/*', '/run/*', '/etc/mtab', \
'/var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb', 'lost+found/*', \
'/tmp/*', '/var/tmp/*', '/var/backups/*', '.Private' ]