ietf-nntp new draft of base document available

[Howard Swinehart]

From: "Charles Lindsey" <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk>
> In <yld7k9vppk.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery
> <rra at stanford.edu> writes:
> >Does the addition of the above sentence fully clarify it?
>
> Not on its own.
>
> I think what the spec needs to say is that you do a left-to-right
> scan of
> the comma-separated list of wildmats, constructing a set of
> newsgroups as
> you go along. A '!' wildmat then removes from the set. Assume "*" at
> the
> beginning if it starts with a '!'. That is my gut feel of what INN
> is
> observed to do, but that needs confirmation from someone who
> understands
> the code.

I found the code at ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/ and grabbed one of the
snapshots.

Russ Allbery, please correct me if I'm wrong.  The NEWNEWS command
eventually calls a function named PERMmatch to compare a list of
wildmats to a newsgroup.

Here's how each newsgroup is compared:

 set the status to false

 Repeat the following for each pattern:
  if it's preceeded by '!' and it matches, set the status to false
  if it's not preceeded by '!' and it matches, set the status to true

When you reach the end of the list of patterns, the final status tells
you whether to include or exclude the newsgroup.

So if I have this stored in my noodle correctly, non-matches have no
effect and matches to the right override matches to the left.