ietf-nntp Wildmats

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Thu Nov 16 12:52:32 PST 2000


Stan O Barber <sob at verio.net> writes:
> "Clive D.W. Feather" wrote:

>> In all except PAT, comma makes sense as alternative. If we provide a
>> way to escape comma, then we can do the same for PAT and everything
>> becomes much simpler to describe.

> This is a great analysis. This indicates to me that PAT should probably
> not use wildmat and use something else altogether. If we do that, then
> wildmat can be defined just to deal with newsgroup names and that's
> really what it was invented to do.

Hm.  The advantage of using wildmat for PAT is that all news servers
already have wildmat support built in and it's existing practice for XPAT
(well, mostly).  Switching to something else (like regexes?  how big of a
change?) means adding a new pattern matching language to the server.

I think it's reasonably obvious that commas should be escapeable with \
and that isn't inconsistent with wildmat syntax as previously specified.
Given that, and given that introducing \u and \U may well be useful for
newsgroup names down the road, what are the drawbacks of using wildmat for
PAT?

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



More information about the ietf-nntp mailing list