ietf-nntp OVER and PAT

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl66llxceq.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


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

>> So can we first of all agree to accept that rule for OVER, even though
>> noone currently implements it, on the grounds that there is no
>> consistent interpretation in use anyway?

>I think that given the charter of the working group, when we're dealing
>with existing concepts (rather than something new like PAT that's just
>based on XPAT, XHDR, and a few other things), the phrase "even though no
>one currently implements it" should raise all sorts of warning bells.

That would be so if there was a majority view amongst implementations on
how to do it. But AIUI there are six ways of implementing it currently,
with no obvious leader. In such a situation, it makes as much sense to
introduce a clean 7th method as to make an arbitrary choice of one of the
6.

>If Andrew says doing this causes problems in practice, I'm inclined to go
>with that as a good reason not to do things this way.  It's theoretically
>cleaner, but theory and practice have had a long time to diverge.

I think we have to ask Andrew to explain his problems again.

Note that if you do not canonicalise whitespace into single SP, then you
need the \u (whatever) construct in wildmats to be defined as matching
arbitrary whitespace, because there is no other wildmat construct that
would do that.

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