ietf-nntp new draft of the NNTP spec released

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Tue Jul 20 07:50:28 PDT 1999


In <ylso6k8amk.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>alt.*,!alt.*binaries*,alt.weirdbinaries* already does this too.  Sticking
>with the existing language also has the advantage that people already know
>how to read and write wildmat expressions like the above.

Yes, but in our current draft the ',' notation is only allowed in the
NEWNEWS command, whereas it would we useful to have it in various of the
LIST commands. Does INN allow it in those places? I don't really mind
whether the ',' and the '!' are part of the wildmat syntax or not, so long
as they are allowed to be used somehow in all sensible cases.

>Also note that wildmat expressions are not limited in domain just to
>newsgroups.  Even news servers use them for matching various other things.
>It's important to keep that in mind before doing anything like special-
>casing '.'.

Yes, treating '.' specially looks like an avoidable kludge.

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