Re: [RFC] Gnus generalized search, part II

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:

> On Apr 23, 2017, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
>> Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:
>>
>>> Will mairix be supported?
>>
>> Sure! At least, I think so -- I'm not clear why nnmairix is its own
>> server, rather than being an nnir engine. I think if it's used in raw
>> mode it should work just like the other engines. At any rate, as many
>> engines as possible should be supported.
>
> I don't know much about how things work in the background, but mairix
> produces a maildir of results, so maybe that's why it is handled
> specially.  One of the great things about it is that it can already
> combine results from maildirs and mboxes, so it already works across
> (some) servers.
>
> But from a configuration perspective, I've often had trouble with
> nnmairix, so it would be great if it could be fitted into a more
> general, stable set-up.

Anything you can remember about these troubles would be helpful. And I
hope you'll be willing to test the mairix support when it's ready (I've
already added the backend, but the query transformation will take a bit
more work).

> Maybe mairix's raw mode that you mention would help with this?  But
> then Gnus would have to work backwords from the maildir paths and
> nnfolder paths + position in file to figure out the messages...

Gnus already does that for *all* of the other locally-indexed search
engines, so that's no big deal :)

>>> How do you handle differing capabilities of the search backends?
>
> [...]
>
>> What do you think?
>
> Sounds reasonable, especially if it is documented and maybe displays
> warnings/messages in some cases.

Yup, it might be nice to just drop a message saying that some search
terms were ignored, that's a good idea.