nnir/freeWAIS-sf

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

FreeWAIS seems to be a difficult beast to deal with... I finally got
version 2.2.13 installed successfully on a FreeBSD OS.

Still having poor luck getting freeWAIS to co-operate with nnir.

In brief, the problem areas I encounter are:

1) The C-u G G (allow group selection)  option does not work with freeWAIS

2) Queries aimed at `from' or `to' fields fail, although queries to
   `subject' field or global queries, work

First a few facts about the basis of this report:
1) I've created a ~/Mail directory containing only two sub
   directories.  My collections of messages to ding list and bbdb list
   So ~/Mail/ ding bbdb 


2) Using the example *.fmt file from nnir-1.57.el and giving it the title mail.fmt:

   # Kai's format file for freeWAIS-sf for indexing mails.
   # Each mail is in a file, much like the MH format.
                                           
   # Document separator should never match -- each file is a document.
   record-sep: /^@this regex should never match@$/
                                           
   # Searchable fields specification.      
                                           
   region: /^[sS]ubject:/ /^[sS]ubject: */ 
           subject "Subject header" stemming TEXT BOTH
   end: /^[^ \t]/                          
                                           
   region: /^([tT][oO]|[cC][cC]):/ /^([tT][oO]|[cC][cC]): */
           to "To and Cc headers" SOUNDEX BOTH
   end: /^[^ \t]/                          
                                           
   region: /^[fF][rR][oO][mM]:/ /^[fF][rR][oO][mM]: */
           from "From header" SOUNDEX BOTH
   end: /^[^ \t]/                          
                                           
   region: /^$/                            
           stemming TEXT GLOBAL            
   end: /^@this regex should never match@$/

3) Wais command line used to create the index:
   waisindex -r -d mail -stem -t fields ~/Mail
   (also tried without -stem getting the same results:
   waisindex -r -d mail  -t fields ~/Mail )

4) These settings in .gnus:
    (load "nnir-1.57.elc")
 (setq nnir-wais-database "/home/reader/.wais/mail")
 (setq nnir-search-engine `wais)

In gnus Group buffer pressing `C-u G G':
Query: nnir <RET>

(No prompt to select group spec appears during any of what follows)

Gives almost instantaneous results of two messages from ding list 

Query: from=Kai <RET>
Gives:
Couldn't request group: Search produced empty results

(but we all know better..:
grep -r ^From:.*Kai' Mail/ding2|wc -l
150)

I read somewhere that freeWAIS has trouble with words containing both
upper and lower case so:

Query: from=rossjohann <RET>
Gives:
Couldn't request group: Search produced empty results

(But again we know better:
grep -v 'From:.*rossjohann' ~/Mail|wc -l
150)

Further:
Query:  to=ding or to=bbdb both give the no results message


There are *NO* stop words in the index

Subject queries work:
Query: subject=nnir    
Gives intant results from ding group
Query: subject=postal  
Gives instant results from bbdb group
Query: subject=give
Gives intant results from both groups