ietf-nntp Wildmats

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>> Just because ',' cannot occur in a newsgroup name doesn't prevent a
>> user from sending a pattern with a wildmat set containing a comma.  If
>> they did so, it would be treated as Andrew describes.

> But there would be no point in a user doing such a thing, so we should not
> care overmuch.

I'll agree with that.

> If OTOH you are concerned that it might arise when people use XPAT as
> currently implemented, then there may be a problem, and forbidding
> "a[b,c]d" would be the way to solve it. Do existing implementations
> currently flag that case as an error?

It's irrelevant what XPAT does.  XPAT isn't a standardized command and
doesn't need to even use the same language.  In current CVS INN, XPAT
doesn't even use the same wildmat routine as the rest of INN.

Barring any futher developments, my intention for INN is to support its
historic behavior without change and without regard to what wildmat means
elsewhere; I don't think that XPAT is standardizeable nor would I really
recommend its use for new clients.  The effort put into fiddling with XPAT
would be better put into coming up with a new and better-specified search
command that used a matching syntax suitable for matching free-form text.

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