Re: gnus-search configuration example for notmuch

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:

> On Mar 23, 2022, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
>> Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca> writes:
>>
>>> On Mar 22, 2022, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> To add to what everyone else has said: most of the mail backends (nnml,
>>>> nnmaildir, etc) keep their messages as files on the file system, so any
>>>> search engine that indexes files and gives you full filenames back as
>>>> search results (including notmuch, namazu, mairix) will work with them.
>>>> It's really nnimap that is a special case
>>>
>>> I guess nnfolder is also a special case?
>> 
>> I don't think nnfolder is a special case: as long as both the Gnus
>> backend and the search engine deal in absolute file paths, they should
>> be able to talk to one another. If something special needs to be done to
>> translate mairix search results into something that nnfolder can
>> understand, I'd like to know about that and implement it.
>
> With nnfolder, each file contains an entire group's worth of messages.
> So how can it work if mairix provides just a list of full filenames?

It won't! Unless mairix can provide a matching line number, or some
other indication of where in the file the match is, we won't be able to
find the matching message. I can't think of any simple way around the problem.