Hi friends of AMANDA!

after years I am coming back to Amanda and am overjoyed at the progress
the package has made. I especially like the GNUTAR support (or which I
was the first glimpses just before I stopped using ...).

Anyway, I now have some questions/problems regarding defining backup sets
for GNUTAR backups.

I want to create a single backup of
        /var/imap/*
and     /var/spool/imap/*

I tried this:

localhost var-imap /var {
        comp-user-tar
        include "./imap*"
        include "./spool/imap/*"
        } 1

to no avail. The ./spool/imap/*
and its subdirs never made it to the archive.

on looking back at the manual, it says:
        All include expression are expanded by amanda and concatenated in
        one file  and passed to gnutar as a --files-from argument.  They
        must start with "./" and containing no other "/".
which would explain that ./spool/imap* dis not work.

Note that I will not know of any other subdirectories of /var
and /var/spool which I could explicitly exclude...

So here my questions regarding include/exclude:

a) Is there any way around this limitation?

b) In which sequence are include and excludes processed?
        1. in the sequence they appear in the definition,
           ie, does
                exclude './[a-z]*'
                include './big1'
           include big1 or will the preceding exclude
           already result in it not being seen at all?

           and/or would
                include './big1'
                exclude './[a-z]*'

           result in big1 being included or excluded?

        2. includes before excludes
        3. excludes before includes

c) does using include in a definition imply a preceding 'exclude all'
  and vice versa?

d) Is there a way to get amanda to do a dry-run to show which files
  it would include/exclude with a given definition but not actually
  do a backup?

any help is appreciated

thanks
Mathias