ietf-nntp new draft of the NNTP spec released

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylvhbg8ans.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> But in the end I suspect that compatibility with existing INN practice
>> is what we really want, so it would be useful to document what that
>> is.

>  This is from INSTALL in INN
>2.3.

>    In many cases, wildmat patterns can be specified in a comma-separated
>    list to indicate a list of newsgroups.  When used in this fashion, each
>    pattern is checked in turn to see if it matches, and the last pattern in
>    the line that matches the group name is used.  Patterns beginning with
>    `!' mean to exclude groups matching that pattern.  For example:

>        *, !comp.*, comp.os.*

It seems to me that INN only allows the '!' at the start of a wildmat, and
not, for example, comp.!sys.*. Is that correct? I could probably live with
that as one way out of this problem.

However, the wording you quote above seems vague. I guess it means:
	"Start from the right. Stop when you match the group. If the place
	where you stopped has a '!', reject the group, otherwise accept."
But that does not deal with the case where no match is found at all. If the
pattern given is
	!comp.*
then I would expect alt.foo to get through, but from what you say it seems
not.

>    See wildmat(5) for full details on wildmat patterns.

Please could you post the text of that man page here.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email:     chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk  Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9     Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7  65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5