Re: mail regex

[Alain Magloire]

Bonjour

> > - providing support for this will force the link of regex suite
> >   which is big and sometime not available.
> >   We could drop GNU regex in mailutils/lib/regex.c and fallback to it
> >   for system missing it .. but still.
> 
> Yes, I guess it is a good idea.

Ok, I'll take care of it.

>  
> > - If I want to search explicitly for substring in subject that contains
> >   metachars '* < > ? . $' etc .. it is impossible.
> 
> Why? One can always escape metacharacters, e.g:
> 
>       from /a \* subject/

Yes, my point is that it was not backward compatible with what
POSIX mailx or any other mailxs are currently doing.

> I believe it is a very useful extension. We can provide an environment
> variable controlling this feature, so that those who don't need it
> might simply place
> 
>       set noregex
> 
> in their mail.rc file to turn the feature off.

Ok, That is perferct, that way we still can retain the old semantics.
Like it.
 
> 
> I'd vote that we add a check for regexp to configure.in with a fallback
> rx.c or regex.c in lib/.

Ok.

> 
> Actually, I am thinking about a more general approach. Sometimes it
> is necessary to select letters on the contents of an arbitrary
> header.  So, I'd extend the search syntax to something like
> 
>       Received:/.*mirddin.*/
> 
> meaning select all the letters with the given regexp in Received: header.
> If the "header:" portion is omitted, it defaults to Subject:.
> Any comments?

Yes, can we extend this to specify messages body for the search ?

--
alain