ietf-nntp Simplification of wildmat

[Russ Allbery]

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

> No, there is benefit in the improved wildmats because they instantly
> become applicable in various other commands than NEWNEWS. Since much of
> the improved format is already widely implemented, that should be no
> problem.

It isn't within scope for this working group to develop new features.  I
think that in and of itself is a persuasive argument for documenting the
minimum subset and leaving the rest to be documented and implemented as an
extension.

> So I prefer to go with Clive's formulation, but cutting it down to the
> minimum necessary to match newsgroup-names (leaving implementors to do
> the best they can if they continue to support XPAT). This means at least
> including '!' and ',', though I could be persuaded to leave out '[...]',
> and I think there is no remaining need for '\' at all. If '[...]' 
> remains, then it seems we may have to forbid ',' within it.

I wouldn't argue strongly against this provided that we dropped [...].
After reading the whole thread on wildmats and after reading that
extremely complicated ABNF, I think that [...] is complicating our draft
for no really good reason.

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