[Mailman-Developers] Topic regexps
Brad Knowles
brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Wed May 24 19:48:26 CEST 2006
At 1:12 PM -0400 2006-05-24, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> I have a hard time imagining that anyone would enter
>
> one
> two
> three
>
> and not expect it to match 'one|two|three', so I think I'd opt for 1.
That's what I would have expected, and I was very surprised to
hear Mark's explanation that this didn't actually happen.
> I'm not in favor of yet another configuration variable to control this.
> OTOH, I've never really received much feedback on the whole topics
> features (thus the dearth of responses to your question ;) so I don't
> really have a good sense of how people are using this, if they are at
> all.
I think the concept is a good one, and on busy lists I would
gladly subscribe to a few topics and leave the rest, but I think it
needs some additional work before we can get to the point where I'd
actually use it. For one thing, you need a way of explicitly
selecting the null topic.
> I'm not sure the verbose interpretation of the text box is the most
> useful. The other option is to use some special prefix character at the
> front of the regexp to indicate whether it should be verbose or not. It
> would have to be something that is impossible in the first position, and
> it seems like | would be a good choice. Thus if | were in the first
> position, you'd interpret that to mean each line should be joined with |
> but if not, then you interpret the entire regexp as a verbose pattern.
Not understanding what a "verbose pattern" is, I'm not really
fully understanding this concept.
I can say that I think it would be pretty wild to come across a
new twist in variable regexps like this, after twenty or so years of
mucking about with Unix, etc....
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
LOPSA member since December 2005. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
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