Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-sieve-variables-04.txt

[Philip Guenther <[e-mail]>]

Kjetil Torgrim Homme <[e-mail]> writes:
>On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 10:51 -0700, Ned Freed wrote:
...
>> 4.1.2.2.  Modifier ":quoteregex"
>> 
>>    Every character with special meaning for :regex (".", "*", "?" etc.)
>>    is prefixed with "
>> 
>> I assume you meant '"\"' and not '"'. Looks like you need to apply
>> some quoting to the draft source...
>
>yeah, I always forget that \ must be written \e in roff.
>
>> The lack of a full list of regex specials is a bit awkward here, but I
>> guess I can live with it.
>
>there is no ABNF in [REGEX] to refer to, and a full list will be prone
>to inaccuracies.  not that I expect any changes to the syntax allowed by
>it, but ...

That would be an argument for moving :quoteregex to the regex draft.  I
don't see any wording that limits support for :quotaregex to when the
regex extension is also required, so even implementations that don't
support regex will need to support :quoteregex.  To me, that means that
this document needs to specify exactly what its behavior is.  (Yeah, you
could make [REGEX] a normative reference, but ... ick.)

(Hmm, what if the regex extension is revised to support not just the
normal ("extended") POSIX regexps but also the old "basic" regexps?  The
quoting rules for the two are different.  (Basic regexps are _not_ a
subset of extended regexps for functionality, though the GNU
implementations have blurred that fact by extending them both.))


Anyway, if :quoteregex isn't moved, then the minimal list of characters
that are escaped by :quoteregex is:

\ . [ ^ $ ( ) { * + ? |


On an unrelated point, the [SIEVE] reference needs to be changed to the
replacement I-D to dodge the "no side-effects in tests" restriction.


Philip Guenther