Re: document status: 3028bis, body, editheader

On Tue Mar 28 03:07:20 2006, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-03-25 at 09:26 -0800, Ned Freed wrote:
>
> > > I thought Dave Cridland's suggestion to specify matching 
> behaviour in
> > > the comparator itself was intriguing:
> > >
> > > http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.mta-filters/2689
> > >
> > > unfortunately, [draft-newman-i18n-comparator-08] says «the 
> equality test
> > > MUST be reflexive, symmetric and transitive», so "EQUAL" can't 
> be used.
> > > I must admit I don't quite understand how :matches and :regex 
> work with
> > > comparators, though.
> > > > I think of it this way: A comparator has as one of it's 
> components a
> > normalization operation. Pull that operation out, apply it, and 
> then
> > perform the glob or regex operation on the result. Note that the
> > output of the normalization is best seen as a series of 
> nonnegative
> > integers or someting similar, not octets or characters.
>
>
> thanks.
>
> so you split your match pattern into constant strings without the
> wildcards, send each to the comparator which returns a list of 
> start and
> end points for each matched constant string, and then see if you can
> find a sequence of (start, end) for each constant string where the
> intervals between the constant strings match the wildcards.  *phew*
>
> that will work for :matches (although I doubt anyone will actually
> implement it that way -- so the pluggable comparator idea goes out 
> the
> window), but not for :regex.  unless I'm missing something again :-)
I think we have to document reality here. The reality seems to be 
that not only do comparators have a normalization operation, but they 
also have a match operation. I *suspect* that the matching function 
has '?', '%', and '*' wildcards, although only two are used in Sieve.
I'd like to float the notion that somebody writes text suitable to 
document this at the comparator level.
We'd want to define this such that existing usage is captured, and 
sensible definitions for i;basic* apply, such that '?' wildcard 
behaviour works as expected.
Dave.
--
          You see things; and you say "Why?"
  But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
   - George Bernard Shaw