That is actually a very good point. There is an expectation, built into
NNTP, that users will be able to filter newsgroup-names using "wildmats"
(which are a restricted form of regular expression). The draft of the
new NNTP standard (draft-ietf-nntpext-base-15.txt) goes to considerable
trouble to define wildmats in such a way that they will work with UTF-8.
Which is an argument in favor of using UTF-8 newsgroup names on the wire
between news servers, since then a UTF-8-aware wildmat will work as one
expects. If newsgroup names are decoded into UTF-8 before matching,
wildmat matches will always work as expected.
seems like the code needs to be changed either way. existing expression
matchers seem unlikely to do useful things with utf-8 regardless of whether or
not the utf-8 is encoded as ascii. for instance, will the * character match
a sequence of octets or a sequence of utf-8 characters?