[apparmor] What are "AARE"s, exactly?

[TheDiveO at gmx.eu]

The man page for apparmor.d mentions the "AARE" element in a lot of places, such as for specifying peers. Unfortunately, the man page (or its source parser/apparmor.d.pod) only says "AARE have special meanings; see below. May include VARIABLE". Further down, there is a terse "definition" in form of "?*[]{}" which I simply do not understand.

Disclaimer: I've even found and read the documents in apparmor/documentation/*.odt, but might very well missed a crucial hint about AARE there.

I can imagine that "AARE" means "AppArmor reg exp" and also found utils/apparmor/aare.py. Unfortunately, I'm still not clear from reading the Python source of aare.py about what AAREs really are and how they might differ from regular expressions (which ones) and if they include globbing or not?

Can you please help out and explain what AAREs are from a user's perspective?

Thank you very much!

Harald