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

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

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.
>
> The biggest problem I had was that it would never seem to find the mail
> I expected, so I didn't use it much.  
>
> After inspecting the code the reason became clear: the search was a
> single "exact substring" match performed, not the logical sort of search
> that I have come to expect with Google and other search engines.
>
> So...  the IMAP SEARCH command doesn't do any clever parsing or
> anything; the front end software has to do that.  
>
> Attached is my first "draft" of a more complex search front-end for NNIR
> and IMAP SEARCH -- it parses the query, translates that into a suitable
> IMAP SEARCH command and returns the results.
>
> This is *much* less surprising to me: it returns what I expect, most of
> the time, and takes the sort of input I would expect as well.
>
> At the moment it only handles basic searching, as documented in the
> `nnir-imap-make-query' function in the patch.
>
> I plan to extend this to support the full range of operators that IMAP
> SEARCH supports, but wanted to seek feedback on the initial
> implementation first.
>
> I have signed papers assigning Gnus changes already, so there should be
> no legal reason that this is rejected.

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

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.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
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