wildmats (was: Re: ietf-nntp Draft summary of IETF 48 meeting)

[Andrew Gierth]

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

 > Andrew Gierth <andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
 >> Nonsense. Commands like LIST ACTIVE currently take single wildmat
 >> patterns, and existing implementations will treat commas in those
 >> wildmats literally; therefore this is an incompatible change.

 Russ> So's UTF-8.  It's an incompatible change that might affect a
 Russ> small handful of people, just like UTF-8, since comma isn't a
 Russ> valid character for newsgroup names and are uncommon in the
 Russ> headers people do pattern matching against.

UTF-8 is not so significant a change, since the most commonly-used
patterns (ones which don't use ? or []) will work even if the match
code doesn't understand UTF-8.

On the other hand, a new client that uses LIST ACTIVE foo*,bar*
expecting to get all foo* groups and all bar* groups will fail to
work on old servers.

UTF-8 is a necessary change, commas in wildmats are not. We should not
be introducing changes that are neither compatible with existing
practice nor absolutely necessary.

-- 
Andrew.