ietf-nntp Simplification of wildmat

[Russ Allbery]

Lee Kindness <lkindness at csl.co.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes:

>> Well, if you have ',' and '!' available, alt.?*,!alt.x*.  But how often
>> do you actually use such a pattern?  (As mentioned here before, Diablo
>> doesn't even have set notation in its wildmat implementation.)

> Which is indicative of our situation... How often are wildmats actually
> used 'out in the wild'? Don't most servers user OVER/XOVER and then do
> local searches on the returned information?

We no longer have any commands in our draft that do wildmat matching
against headers.

The wildmat support remaining is for NEWGROUPS, NEWNEWS, and LIST.  It
only matches against newsgroup names, not against any kind of free-form
text.  We have to say something about wildmat in those instances because
it's been part of the protocol since RFC 977.  In current implementations,
NEWNEWS allows commas and ! patterns and the other two don't.

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