I'm wondering about the value a change like this might have for Hudson:

My organization has a wide spread discipline of placing artifacts in a "build"
directory, and creating a subdirectory named "private" into which intermediate
files not required are placed. A typical pattern used to gather the artifacts
with ant based builds is to use something a long the lines of

includes="build/*" excludes="build/private/*"

An example for a Hudson plugin build being done through Hudson, might be to pick
up artifacts from

includes="target/**/"

The first part of the change I was thinking about whas that default
ArtifactArchiver might be made more powerful by allowing a second field for
negation since the ant-style pattern is somewhat limited in what it can express.
This allows a blanket pattern to be specified that would work for anyone who has
a similar layout for thier projects.

The second part, would be to enable a global default for the ArtifactArchiver.
This would allow the Hudson configuration to be specified once, with the
aforementioned pattern and that would be subsequently applied to all projects.
Making artifact archiving a policy type decision for those who choose use it as
such. Projects would still have the option to override the default, disabling or
changing the artifact patterns.

This would be convenient for me, and possibly others who have a similar approach
to their project layouts. There are other things I could do, like just change my
layout so that I put artifacts in one place and intermediates in another. That
would work just as well, (I'm just trying to introduce new tools with the least
resistance possible - so making things look the same to developers is a part of
that)

I could make a patch that would do what I've described, but if this is not
something that would have value to the community, I can invest my time in
something others would find more use in.