ietf-nntp OVER and PAT

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Wed Nov 22 03:41:24 PST 2000


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

>Why do you feel that those to headers should be equivalent?  DRUMS
>explicitly says that they're not.  DRUMS says that the following two
>headers are equivalent:

>    Subject: Re: This is a test header

>    Subject: Re: This is a
>     test header

Yes, that is a valid argument. Trouble is that people doing actual folding
(manually) will tend to put in multiple spaces or a TAB, because it looks
better, and it would be nice to recognise them easily. Maybe there was a
subject header
	Subject: foo bar
and later there was
	Subject foo baz (was: foo bar)
which someone later folded to
	Subject foo baz (was: foo
	    bar)
and then you came along with your PAT looking for 
	PAT Subject 1- *foo bar*
or	PAT Subject 1- *foo\sbar* or whatever

OTOH, what we should really be concerned about is foldings that were done
automatically by the software (yes, I know USEFOR says that MUST NOT
happen, but it will). Can we rely on an automatic folder to stick to the
DRUMS rule?

BTW, following the DRUMS line implies that CR and LF should simply be
omitted entirely during the OVER canonicalisation. Would Andrew be happy
with that?

>I think we're getting towards regular expressions here, honestly.  Maybe
>PAT is an inherently bad idea and what we really want to do is standardize
>XHDR and introduce a separate command that uses regexes.  Bleh.

Yes, I think this has to be where this thread is leading. What will people
use PAT for? Surely as a way of doing killfiling on the server (instead of
doing it on the client using the overview). Killfiles have traditionally
been RE-based.

BUT if we invent a header using REs (whether we call it PAT or HDR or
something else), we will still come up against the problem that NNTP
parameters are separated by SP, and are not supoosed to contain SP within
themselves.

At least leaving PAT out and putting HDR in (as a tidied up XHDR) would
mean we were merely documenting existing best practice. And the whole
question of respresenting SP in wildmats would simply go away.

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