ietf-nntp Notes from the NNTPEXT Meeting today at IETF 46

[Charles Lindsey]

In <382D1F2E.42B38CCB at verio.net> "Stan O. Barber" <sob at verio.net> writes:


>Charles Lindsey wrote:

>> 
>> And finally, finally, can I remind you that I raised all these exact
>> issues in December 1998, and since then we have had two drafts which have
>> not corrected them. PLEASE can we have discussions of these texts on the
>> LIST. You are trying to debug a complicated program by bringing it to an
>> IETF meeting once a year. And if the fix does not work you wait until the
>> next IETF meeting to fix that, and so on.

>As always, specific text that addresses these issues makes it a much more
>concrete a discussion. Once you are able to produce such text that you believe
>can address this, then I believe we can move forward in clarifying these issues.

>Unfortunately, you can criticize the text as written, but can't seem to propose
>alternative that clarify them. You didn't do that in Decemeber of 1998 and you
>still have not done it now.

It is no use proposing texts until we have decided what effects we want.
In any case, I have my work cut out writing texts for the USEFOR draft,
and I don't really want to get involved with the nitty of NNTP.

OK, let's ask some questions.

1. NEWNEWS would seem easy to fix. Presumably the following is meant to
work:

NEWNEWS news.announce.*,!news.announce.conferences

It works fine in current INN implementations. A text could easily be
written for this special case, but first we need to see whether there is a
more general solution.

2. Do we want the same behaviour in LIST NEWSGROUPS and friends? I.e.:

LIST NEWSGROUPS news.announce.*,!news.announce.conferences

That is not allowed in the current draft (there is only 1 wildmat allowed)
but is seems a reasonable thing to expect. Does INN do it, and if not can
it go into our present draft without getting involved in extensions?

3. The main problem, for me, is PAT, because I just don't know what is
MEANT to happen. But at least PAT is a new command (it used to be XPAT),
so some tweaks of the syntax might be allowed. Three questions:

a) Why is it a space-separated list of wildmats here, rather than a comma
separated list?

b) Is it meant to accept a header that matches ANY of the wildmats, or a
header that matches ALL of the wildmats?

c) Is it meant to match the WHOLE of the header (usually a Subject line)
or is it sufficient to match a string in the middle?

>-- 
>Stan   | Director of Technical Operations  | Work Email: sob at verio.net
>Olan   | Phone: +1-713-793-0222    VERIO   | Personal Email: sob at academ.com
>Barber | Fax:   +1-713-793-0221            | Opinions expressed are only mine.

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