ietf-nntp new draft of the NNTP spec released

[Charles Lindsey]

In <199907151419.JAA24841 at academ.com> pmee at uk.tobit.com writes:

>1) ! at the start of the wildmat negates the result of the wildmat.  I.e., !alt.*binaries* indicates all groups 
>not beginning with alt.*binaries*

>2) ! may be used within a wildmat as a command to add negation to the individual section of a wildmat (sections 
>delimited by the . character) or where no . character follows the ! character, to negate the rest of the 
>wildmat with the rest of the string match.  Examples:

I am not very happy with giving a special meaning to '.', although it does
seem in your proposal to have the effect of limiting the scope of the '!'.
But what then is the meaning of"
	alt.!foo*!baz ?
I can still argue that alt.foobarbaz is both forbidden and allowed.

All this syntax is notoriously tricky to get watertight.

May I suggest that a useful next moove would be for somebody to document
exactly what the current INN implementation actually does (esp. for the
NEWNEWS command). And if someone could persuade Rich Salz to join in the
discussion ...

>  When used in combination with the , character the wildmat would (I'd advise) indicate a list of separate 
>wildmats with the first having least precedence and the last having most precedence.  Therefore 
>alt.*,alt.*!*binaries*,alt.weirdbinaries* would match alt.example and alt.weirdbinariestomatch but not 
>alt.otherbinariestomatch and not alt.useless.weirdbinariestomatch.

Yes, that part of the rule might wash, especially as it is my belief that
INN implements NEWNEWS that way.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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