[Mailman-Developers] Topic regexps

[Brad Knowles]

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/>.