Permit matching slashes in @RequestMapping @PathVariables

There's been a longstanding desire for some mechanism to match path variables including slash characters in @RequestMapping templates. The existing workarounds all seem to boil down to grabbing the HTTP request object and manually re-parsing the path.

In my own specific case, I have a hierarchy of parameterized static content that essentially dispatches to views based on the path but needs to set up some model attributes first. This seems to be a common use case and currently requires multiple-mapping hacks.

It would be very helpful to have a mechanism to explicitly specify that a path variable should match internal slash characters, perhaps as an extension of the var:regex syntax (can't include braces there).