Re: NNIR, IMAP SEARCH, and the infinite pain of search terms.

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:
> On Mon, Dec 10 2007, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Gnus contains, in contrib/, the nnir.el interface to search engines.
>> This is a nice tool and, pleasantly, supports IMAP SEARCH to give me
>> efficient searching of my IMAP mail ... or so I thought.

[...]

> Installed.  Thanks for your contribution.  Sorry for the delay.

No problem.  I still have, on my task list, implementing a generic query
language for nnir, then passing that to the appropriate back-ends, so
/hopefully/ this will not be the last you see of that.

> Could you please suggest an improved variant of my minimal ChangeLog
> entry?
>
> 	* nnir.el (nnir-run-imap): Add doc string.  Use `nnir-imap-make-query'.
> 	(nnir-imap-make-query, nnir-imap-query-to-imap)
> 	(nnir-imap-expr-to-imap, nnir-imap-parse-query, nnir-imap-next-expr)
> 	(nnir-imap-peek-symbol, nnir-imap-next-symbol)
> 	(nnir-imap-delimited-string, nnir-imap-end-of-input): New
> 	functions.

Hrm.  Well, the purpose of the change is:

      * nnir.el (nnir-run-imap): Add doc string.  Use `nnir-imap-make-query'.
 	(nnir-imap-make-query, nnir-imap-query-to-imap)
 	(nnir-imap-expr-to-imap, nnir-imap-parse-query, nnir-imap-next-expr)
 	(nnir-imap-peek-symbol, nnir-imap-next-symbol)
 	(nnir-imap-delimited-string, nnir-imap-end-of-input): 
        New functions.  Implement a query language for IMAP search,
        parse that and compose the back-end query from it.  This allows
        searches with AND, OR and fixed strings, not just a single
        substring.

I don't think that meets the GNU coding standards, though, which I
confess have never made much sense to me for changes like this.[1]

For something in news that summary would definitely fit, or something
adapted from my comments above.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  I can't see how anything meaningful can be recorded in the style
     requested, and welcome pointers to a better guide.