ietf-nntp OVER and PAT

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Tue Nov 21 03:16:40 PST 2000


In <yly9yee07e.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>I am absolutely opposed to ever making \u match more than one character
>under any circumstances whatsoever.  I think that's a huge departure from
>what \u means in C and what \-escapes mean everywhere else, and I think
>that would be horribly confusing.

Then don't use '\u'. Use something else ('\S' perhaps).

>I don't understand why you think there's such a strong need to match
>arbitrary whitespace.  Why is this such an important property?  Why can't
>the client use a number of \u sequences equal to the number of spaces that
>are present, provided that headers are unfolded using something like the
>DRUMS rules before the match takes place?  Clients which modify the
>whitespace in the header apart from folding when composing followups are
>broken anyway, and at least my news reader already doesn't recognize such
>mangled Subject lines as the same subject.

Because the client doesn't know how many spaces he is trying to match (if
he already knew what was in the header, then he probably wouldn't be using
PAT in the first place). In particular, if the client is trying to match
whitespace where he suspects there may have been a fold, then he is
completely lost because different implementations put different numbers of
SPs there anyway. If we can fix that part of the problem, then there is
less need to match arbitrary whitespace.

So I think we need to fix either the canonicalisation in OVER, OR provide
whitespace matching in wildmats. I agree it is not necessary to fix both.

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