Consider improvements to handling suffixed URL patterns [SPR-15618]

[spring-projects-issues]

Andy Clement opened SPR-15618 and commented

See the discussion in #19112 and #20156. It feels like suffixes are a common thing
(patterns ending '.*', '.txt', '.html') and it could be worth special handling for them. Possibly
a new PathElement subtype specifically for suffixed PathElements (because currently "{foo}.*") type patterns are captured as RegexPathElement instances (the least optimal of the PathElement subtypes).

Under #20156 a temporary fix was made to avoid treating '.*' as usage of a wildcard in the PathPattern comparator which feels wrong to some degree (because there is a wildcard there!) but it is what the AntPathMatcher comparator does (See PatternInfo#initCounters()) so it was done to make them consistent.

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No further details from SPR-15618

[rstoyanchev]

Suffix patterns are already deprecated in Spring MVC and will be turned off by default in 5.3, eventually to be removed. We don't really want to add them here.