Re: nnweb + Gmane search

[Andreas Seltenreich <andreas+ding@gate450.dyndns.org>]

Olly Betts writes:
> Andreas Seltenreich <andreas+ding@gate450.dyndns.org> writes:
>> If an option to customise the number of results per page could be
>> added to the Xapian-powered search, it'd be as usable via nnweb as the
>> google one.
>
> It already exists, just pass a CGI parameter called HITSPERPAGE.  The value
> is clipped to the range 10-1000.

Great, would it be okay to just set HITSPERPAGE to nnweb-max-hits and
doing a single request per search? One could also decrease the default
upper bound of 999 articles, but if this really is an issue, it would
be better to hardcode a limit for the Gmane part of nnweb, since
nnweb-max-hits is a user-customizable variable.

>> Of course, if there was an option to output the result set as S-exps
>> or nov-lines it'd be even better .
>
> I don't have enough information available to produce nov-lines unless some
> fields aren't required (no message-id for example).

It wouldn't have to be complete, just enough to present the hits to
the user plus something in the xref header one can construct links to
the raw articles from. Currently, nnweb parses the html output and
generates nov-lines like the following:

19	(gmane.emacs.gnus.general) Re: nnweb fix (96%)	Andreas Seltenreich <andreas+ding <at> gate450 <dot> dyndns <dot> org>	2006-01-31 05:48:02 GMT	<87vevtxjjv.fsf@totally-fudged-out-message-id>		0	0	Xref: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/61805/raw	

> Other output formats aren't hard to add, but require me to update
> two places if anything changes so are a bit more work to support. So
> I'd prefer something more generic than S-exps.

Now, does "more generic than S-exps" apply to nov-lines :-)? As
stated, it already works by parsing the html output format, but it
kind of pains me to waste bandwidth on useless markup, and those
regexps are likely to break on markup changes.

Thanks!
Andreas