OS6.1.6 - RSYNC does not accept any wildcards

It's now a year and a half later and I guess I should give up on holding my breath for wildcards to be included in the frontview (WebGUI) RSYNC backup on OS 6.

However, I snooped around a bit on what's going on under the hood, and using htop on a running backup job I found that the WebGui is calling a command-line rsync with a separate --exclude=<your excluded path> items for each item in your exclude list.  For example, I have ".Spotlight-V100" and "CrashPlan_Inbound" as excluded items, and I see that the rsync runs as:

rsync <some other options> --exclude=.Spotlight-V100 --exclude=CrashPlan_Inbound  <Source> <Dest>

So at least you can look in the rsync documentation on apache.org to figure out how the exclusions are supposed to behave.  You don't get wildcards, but if you don't start with a / in the exclusion, the excluded will match to the end of any path, so just specifying ".Trashes" means that all the .Trashes files (or Folders) will be ignored in any subdirectory.  Exclusions therefore deserve caution, as you can inadvertently exclude any subdirectory or file named "Library" if you put "Library" in the exclusion list.

It seems as though allowing wildcards should be programmatically trivial, so I went snooping into the frontview config files found in /etc/frontview.  Lo an behold there is a "backup_jobs.conf" file, which seems to be a plain-text xml file.  Well, peeking inside there I found the following weirdness:

...
 <opt_rsync_options>0</opt_rsync_options>
    <opt_email_this_to_alert_email>0</opt_email_this_to_alert_email>
    <opt_rsync_exclude>CrashPlan_Inbound,.Spotlight-V100,.DocumentRevisions-V100,.Trashes,.TemporaryItems,sparseimage,.fseventsd</opt_rsync_exclude>
    <opt_misc_option>0</opt_misc_option>
...

Well, I'm no programmer or system administrator of any kind, and I know just about squat about XML, but I can tell you that you in this internet age, you probably shouldn't separate a list of items with commas, particularly if those items themselves have the possibility of containing commas (as filenames do).  And I have a sorta gut feeling that you really should NOT do this comma-separating thing in XML, particularly since presumeably you're using some kind of XML parser that can do a great job of reading nested XML tags.

 So, if you do ever get ahold of a tech at Netgear, can you ask them Why oh why the don't do something sensible like:

...
 <opt_rsync_options>0</opt_rsync_options>
    <opt_email_this_to_alert_email>0</opt_email_this_to_alert_email>
    <opt_rsync_exclude>
           <exclude_item>CrashPlan_Inbound</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>.Spotlight-V100</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>.DocumentRevisions-V100</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>.Trashes</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>.TemporaryItems</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>sparseimage</exclude_item>
           <exclude_item>.fseventsd</exclude_item>
    </opt_rsync_exclude>
    <opt_misc_option>0</opt_misc_option>
...

And then allow us to put in anything we want, including wildcards and commas, but excluding possibly the < > and & symbols reserved for xml?  That would sure go a LONG LONG way towards giving me some confidence that they know what they're doing over there at Netgear HQ, because right now, looking at this backup_jobs.conf file, I have about 0% confidence in their programming skills.

Damon