ietf-nntp Draft summary of IETF 48 meeting

[Russ Allbery]

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

> Quite simply, what is this command _supposed_ to do?

Here's what INN does:

PAT takes the name of a header, a message ID or article range, and a
wildmat expression.  It then attempts to match that wildmat expression
against the contents of that header in every specified article.  The
response is multiline.  If a message ID was specified and there was a
valid match, the message ID is printed out, followed by a space and the
contents of that header in that message.  Otherwise, each matching article
number is printed out on a line by itself.

The third and subsequent arguments to the command are taken to be the
wildmat.  Multiple spaces or other whitespace are collapsed down into a
single space (ew).  The wildmat *is* anchored at the beginning and end of
the header.

If INN refuses to do the PAT search for some reason (such as the header
not being in overview and not being willing to search articles on disk),
PAT returns an error code *not* an empty successful response.

The problems with this are the grody way wildmats are parsed and the
differing returns depending on whether a message ID or a range of articles
was given.  I think the latter is due to the combining of multiple
commands into one handler (including XHDR and XPAT), so I don't think we
need to preserve it.

My preferred return from PAT would be a list of matches, either article
numbers or a message ID depending on which way of specifying the
article(s) to match against was used.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>