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Re: Who is the procmail maintainer? (revisited 2005)

2005-11-14 02:44:14
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 04:41:48PM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:

On 11/3/05, Google Kreme <gkreme(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

PCRE/better (modern) regex
Didn't we have a thread on this topic?

We did, the upshot of which was that it's unlikely ever to
happen, because too many existing procmailrc files contain
characters/sequences that would be misinterpreted if the regular
expression syntax were to change.

Also keep in mind that the procmail rules for "greediness" of
expressions are different, and its expression engine has other
behavior that is tuned for stream-processing of email.  It's
far more complex than just a matter of dropping in a different
third-party regex package.

Assuming someone could be found who was willing to rewrite
procmail's engine essentially from the ground up, it'd still be
necessary for the legacy behavior to be the default; in effect
there'd be two engines, and you'd need a new flag on each :0 line
to tell procmail that the extended syntax should be used for
the conditions of the recipe (in the way that the D flag tells
procmail to be case-sensitive).

I've been gone for a couple of weeks -- was on vacation in
Japan.

I agree with the upshot of this answer.  Otoh, Mike Peeler
has written a patched procmail that does left-matching without
interfering with any existing feature of procmail.  His
patched version also fixes all bugs that I know about.
I've been meaning to bug him to make it available.  Maybe
I will do so again.  Maybe he'll let me put it on spamless.us
(currently blank, and I wouldn't bother trying this month).

In earlier discussions, we'd also said it would be cool if
there was a way for the D flag to work on an individual
condition line.  I'm all for that!

  :0
  * B ?? foo
  * D ?? bar
  | action

Dallman

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