RFC: small procmailrc.example change

["Malte S. Stretz" <ms...@gmx.net>]

I think about if its a good idea to apply the attached patch to the 
procmailrc.example.  That's what I usually use.  Normally I'd just take 
this as trivial documentation stuff but as that file is our official 
filtering guideline, I'd like to know what you think.

The change has the advantages that the dots are a bit more general than the 
(default) stars, so the user has neither to escape the chars nor to change 
use the _STARS(x)_ macro.  Or the other way round:  Whatever STARS are 
used, it simply works.

The disadvantages?  I can only imaging that the user has to know some RE 
basics to understand what the dots actually do.  OTOH are the escaped 
asterisks not very intuitive either.

Comments?

Cheers,
Malte

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Re: RFC: small procmailrc.example change

[Daniel Quinlan <qu...@pathname.com>]

"Malte S. Stretz" <ms...@gmx.net> writes:

> I think about if its a good idea to apply the attached patch to the 
> procmailrc.example.  That's what I usually use.  Normally I'd just take 
> this as trivial documentation stuff but as that file is our official 
> filtering guideline, I'd like to know what you think.

Hmmm... the \* method is more likely to work on a non-regular expression
environment (glob and substr match) if someone tries to copy the
technique.  I'm not enthusiastic about using a regular expression here,
especially as what we have seems to work.

In the past, I advocated changing the "*" default to "x" as that would
be much easier for users, but it's probably a bad idea to ever change
that.

Side note: I would favor reducing the number of stars from 15 to 10.

Daniel

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Daniel Quinlan
http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/