ietf-nntp Collected minor issues

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylhe9zdly6.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>I don't understand quite what you're getting at.  I would assume that
>UTF-8's collating order in the C locale is just the numeric order of the
>characters.  Surely the client wouldn't attempt to negotiate a locale with
>the server and would instead just assume C locale when constructing
>wildmats?

I don't think NNTP ever wants to be aware of, or be told, any locale
information. So the only collating order available would have to be the
order of Unicode code points (which oddly enough would do quite well for
sorting lists of newsgroups, and the like).

I was concerned that some naive user would try to match "all characters
between 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A' and 'GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA'" and
expect to only be matching on letters. He would of course be disappointed.
And so if/when someone invents this facility, it might include some
restrictions/special rules to avoid such confusions.

>There's a limit to what you can do with wildmats; if you really need to do
>locale-aware matching, you're going to have to download the data and
>interpret it yourself.

Exactly. For wildmats, the [...] feature is not actually particularly
useful in practice.

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