1282127 - Support path exclusion

Status: NEW

(Webtools :: Searchfox, enhancement)

Description

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

A number of people have asked for Searchfox to support path exclusion. Mainly this seems to be for test directories, which are already sorted last, but I could imagine other uses.

Livegrep seems to support some form of path exclusion, so I just need to find the syntax for it. I imagine it would be exposed via -path:xyz.

Comment 1

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

I just did some investigation into how Livegrep handles this. The JSON for normal queries looks like:
  {"body": {"line": "...needle...", "file": "path-regexp", "repo": "repo-regexp"}}

If you want to do negation:
  {"body": {"line": "...needle...", "file": "path-regexp", "repo": "repo-regexp"},
   "not": {"file": "negated-path-regexp", "repo": "negated-repo-regexp"}}

Kind of weird, but whatever. It should be pretty easy to implement this.

Comment 2

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

It would also generally be nice if Searchfox could support more of DXR's behaviour regarding paths, i.e. basically the path equivalent of bug 1426423, so I could use multiple path: and -path: statements in a search, so the results would have to match all of the path: statements and none of the -path:statements.