Subject: Re: Differences between Kerbeors revisions and PKINIT

From: Jeffrey Altman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 9:41:15 EDT

> I don't, currently.  Thankfully, for NNTP, it's probably not necessary.
> wildmats are used mostly to match newsgroup names, where it's going to be
> very clear in the standard that software treats newsgroup names as byte
> strings in a lot of circumstances and therefore hierarchy administrators
> have to pick a single "spelling" and stick with it everywhere, or things
> like names in From addresses, Subject lines of threads, or other similar
> places where while there may be alternate "spellings" of the words, one
> generally only cares about one at a time since software preserves the
> "spelling" on followups / only uses one all the time / etc.

This is probably fine for the Latin character sets but is going to be
a problem for CJK and Arabic since it will not be up to the user to 
determine how a character entered via the keyboard is represented
within an application or operating system.

                  Jeffrey Altman * Sr.Software Designer
                 The Kermit Project * Columbia University
               612 West 115th St * New York, NY * 10025 * USA
     http://www.kermit-project.org/ * [email-masked]

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 05 Aug 2000 13:46:29 -0700

Jeffrey Altman <[email-masked]> writes:

> This is probably fine for the Latin character sets but is going to be a
> problem for CJK and Arabic since it will not be up to the user to
> determine how a character entered via the keyboard is represented within
> an application or operating system.

Ugh.  I was hoping to avoid having to use Unicode tables to resolve stuff
like that.

Thankfully, it still won't matter for newsgroup names.  We're going to
require that they be treatable as byte strings; it may make things more
complicated for the newsreader that has to figure out what canonical form
to use, but it's pretty much a must for the way the transport software
works.  One *has* to be able to a byte-for-byte comparison to match
newsgroup names; anything else is just a staggering loss of performance in
critical code, not to mention a source of endless confusion for older
software.

But it sounds like for things like Subject and From matching, things may
have to get unfortunately complex.  :/

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>