ietf-nntp Draft summary of IETF 48 meeting

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl8zu5m6s5.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>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.

I see no problem with letting the 'gaps' between the various widlmats
represent arbitrary whitespace rather than single spaces. 

The effect of the anchoring is that the Subject of this message would NOT
match
	PAT Subject nnn Draft summary * IETF [0-9][0-9]
is that correct? Note that is would be contrary to the example in the
present draft, which suggests that it WOULD match.

Generally, we should make PAT as close as possible to XPAT. Unfortunately,
the description of XPAT in the Common Extensions draft does not answer
these questions either.

>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.

I have no problem with the "grody way". What is the problem with message
IDs and ranges?

>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.

But I presume you want the matching headers to be listed as well, as at
present? Yes, I see the problem with returning an article number, since
there may not even exist a current group if a message-ID had been given.

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