ietf-nntp Simplification of wildmat

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Apr 30 10:05:00 PDT 2001


Stan O Barber <sob at verio.net> writes:
> "Clive D.W. Feather" wrote:

>> I have put two versions on my web site.

>> <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/section-5a.txt>
>>   Full proposal with sets, updated to the end of this thread. Note that
>>   \ is forbidden, comma can't occur in sets, and [d-a] matches nothing.
>> <http://www.davros.org/nntp-texts/section-5b.txt>
>>   Same proposal with sets removed and [ and ] also forbidden.

Yup, I think the simplification there is definitely worth it, for as
frequently as character sets are used in practice.  The second is much
shorter and easier to read.

I note that both of these support comma and negation, so I guess there's
also a third proposal, namely to remove that as well from the wildmat
description, ban ',' and '!', and describe the matching in the text of the
one command that historically supports it.

I also agree with Andrew that if we keep comma and negation, we need to
clearly note that this is a behavior change from the previous version of
NNTP.

(Clive, do keep the full syntax; I think it's worth publishing as an
extension even if it doesn't go into this RFC.)

> Folks, since a version of this is supposed to be in the next draft, we
> need to settle this wildmat issue right away.

Yup, agreed.

I think this is close to the last major outstanding issue.

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



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