This turned out to be a relatively simple change and I've updated the restriction unit-tests so that they are all passing. It's now a matter of updating the lua tests and dealing with the fallout from that. After an initial look over things it doesn't look like it should be too difficult to do. Then it's just a matter of agreeing that the new semantics are an improvement over the current semantics.
For example, this should now work:
$ mtn add a/b/c
$ mtn commit a/b/c
This will also "work":
$ mtn add a/b/c
$ mtn commit a/b/c --exclude a/b
because explicit excludes are overridden by implicit includes of required parents. The implicit includes only apply to the parent directories themselves, not any of their children (i.e. non-recursively).
If this works out landing the bugfest-2010.20447-dscherger branch should be straightforward.
Cheers,
Derek