testr has no way to exclude tests other than with regexp

So this basically builds a language for including and excluding test, which is exactly what a regex is. What happens if someone includes two different patterns and excludes two different patterns? Is it evaluated left to right or union-adds then subtract all excludes? What if someone can't exclude precisely and wants to exclude then include?

I'm open to the idea of having a meta language rather than just regexp, but it needs to be designed, with care, or it just becomes a wart.

So back during the OpenStack Summit in HK the idea was brought up that we should just specify using the same grammar as rsync for doing this. See these links for examples of this:

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/01/rsync-exclude-files-and-folders/

and the man page:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync

I think this section is probably the relevant portion(at least part of it):

-F same as --filter='dir-merge /.rsync-filter'
                             repeated: --filter='- .rsync-filter'
     --exclude=PATTERN exclude files matching PATTERN
     --exclude-from=FILE read exclude patterns from FILE
     --include=PATTERN don't exclude files matching PATTERN
     --include-from=FILE read include patterns from FILE
     --files-from=FILE read list of source-file names from FILE

See also https://review.openstack.org/#/c/81565/.

This is crucial functionality that's needed by several 3rd party CI systems; for Nova each 3rd party CI system has it's own method for excluding tests.

Is Matthew's suggestion above the way everyone would like to see this go, or are there alternatives?

I would like to be able to exclude specific tests while allowing others (like restricting test_get_system_ca_file in bug 1313257 ). At the moment I have to restrict testing entirely.