Re: Testers wanted: New gnus backend nnselect

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Andrew Cohen <cohen@bu.edu> writes:

[...]

> Great! But there is one quirk to keep in mind. If you start in a
> "normal" group (like one with an imap backend) you can't (easily) insert
> articles from other groups into the same summary buffer. If you look at
> nnimap-request-thread you will notice that if
> gnus-refer-thread-use-search is nil then only the current group is
> probed for thread articles. But if its non-nil then it defers to
> nnselect-search-thread which creates a NEW nnselect ephemeral buffer to
> allow the results to cross groups. You can probably implement this in 
> new nnfoo-request-thread methods for all the backends.
>
> The function nnselect-request-thread is called only when referring a
> thread from an nnselect group. The only way it is engine specific right
> now is in the construction of the search query string
> (nnimap-make-thread-query). So you could provide a function
> nnir-make-thread-query (or better yet encapsulate the whole nnir related
> stuff in nnselect-request-thread into a function like nnir-refer-thread)
> and this would make the function fully universal (and keep all the
> search-related junk in nnir where it belongs)
>
> Then this same function can be used in nnselect-search-thread,
> easy-peasy.
>
> Sorry, re-reading the above paragraphs I might not have been clear (but
> maybe I was?) And I guess I'm suggesting the function should be called
> gnus-refer-thread.
>
> And of course I meant gnus-search-refer-thread :)

My eyes did cross for a second there, reading the above :)

But I think I've got the basics, and will have a look at the details
over the next week. My goal is definitely to make the search code
completely backend agnostic, so that all nnselect-request-thread has to
do is call a single function.

What I'm thinking now is to make thread search a part of the basic query
language. In fact, there would be a few "meta search terms" that could
be specified along with the base query. "thread:t" would be one of them,
along with "count:t", "limit:NN", and "sort:<field>,<field>" (obviously
they can't all be used in conjunction).

The syntax for searching for a single message's thread would be
"thread:t id:<sdfsdf@sdf>". That would get parsed into:

('nnir-query-spec ('query ((id . "<sdfsdf@sdf>")))
                  ('thread t))

It would be up to the search engines to make sense of that.

Eric