nnir advice

nnir advice

[David S. Goldberg]

So, I finally decided that find | xargs grep was no longer sufficient
for searching my mail.  We have some version of glimpse (3.0 it looks
like) here so I ran glimpseindex (just on my mail, my home dir is too
big) and downloaded nnir and set it up.  I like it a lot.  I don't
know how I've lived without it this long.  Thanks Kai!

But now I'm being told that our sysadmins don't want to maintain
glimpse on the end user systems since it doesn't have enough user
demand to justify their time.  I have no problem maintaining my own
copy, but if I have to do that I wonder: should I look for a newer
version, try out this freewais-sf I've seen reference to or something
else?  Any advice or pointers to appropriate URLs would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
-- 
Dave Goldberg
Post: The Mitre Corporation\MS B325\202 Burlington Rd.\Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: 781-271-3887
Email: dsg@mitre.org

Re: nnir advice

[Bud Rogers]

dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg) writes:

> downloaded nnir and set it up.  I like it a lot.  I don't know how I've
> lived without it this long.  Thanks Kai!

Too cool, isn't it?

> I wonder: should I look for a newer version, try out this freewais-sf
> I've seen reference to or something else?  Any advice or pointers to
> appropriate URLs would be greatly appreciated.

Some folks have had trouble using freewais with nnir.  Not sure what or
why.  I already had glimpse, so I used that.  It works really well with
nnir and as a stand-alone search tool.  I'm running glimpse 4.1.  You might
want to go for the latest version.

        http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/

HTH

-- 

Bud Rogers <budr@sirinet.net>

Re: nnir advice

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Bud Rogers <budr@sirinet.net> writes:
> I'm running glimpse 4.1.

Glimpse is fine if you have a smallish archive to index.  However, I
have nearly 300Mbytes of mail over a 10-year-plus period, and
glimpseindex is exceptionally prone to falling over due to some error
in memory allocation, such that (when I was still using glimpse with
nnir) my daily glimpseindex script consisted of about 8 different
invocations separated with "||" and varying only by the -M value.

It's a nightmarish program in some ways.  Once you've got an index,
however, glimpse searching works nicely.

Re: nnir advice

[Bill White]

On 09 Dec 1999 09:54:26 -0600
in article <8766y81559.fsf@twocups.sirinet.net>
Bud Rogers <budr@sirinet.net> said:

[...]

  > Some folks have had trouble using freewais with nnir.  Not sure
  > what or why.  I already had glimpse, so I used that.  It works
  > really well with nnir and as a stand-alone search tool.  I'm
  > running glimpse 4.1.  You might want to go for the latest version.

[...]

For the rest of your glimpse indexes, there's Alan Shutko's
glimpse.el, available at Kai's ftp site:

<url:ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/src/emacs/glimpse.el>

I have 2 separate glimpse indexes - one for mail that I search with
nnir and one for 600MB of text files that I search with glimpse.el.

bw
-- 
Bill White . billw@wolfram.com . http://members.wri.com/billw
"No ma'am, we're musicians."

Re: nnir advice

[Kai Großjohann]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> It's a nightmarish program in some ways.  Once you've got an index,
> however, glimpse searching works nicely.

Well.  Query length is limited to something like 32 characters, and if
your mail lives in /home/crew/username/Mail, then the corresponding
`-F' statement already eats up quite a bit of that.  Hm.

kai
-- 
A preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.

Re: nnir advice

[Arnd Kohrs]

Hi,

has anybody managed to setup an nnir with compressed mails?  The TODO
list claims, that it is an open issue.  However the doc might not be
up to date. 

Arnd.

PS: I haven't sofar succeeded to index the compressed files using the
latest glimpse ;-(.  Somehow the -z option does not work or there is a
lapsus in my .glimpse_filters file.  
-- 
Arnd Kohrs   -   kohrs@acm.org  -  http://www.eurecom.fr/~kohrs
              
The Active WebMuseum, completely remodeled interieur!       
 Visit now ->  http://www.eurecom.fr/~kohrs/museum.html

Re: nnir advice

[Kai Großjohann]

Arnd Kohrs <kohrs@acm.org> writes:

> has anybody managed to setup an nnir with compressed mails?  The TODO
> list claims, that it is an open issue.

Well, I haven't done any work on it.  Can you try to read the nnir.el
sources to see what it does?  It is not really difficult: there is a
function nnir-run-query which dispatches to nnir-run-<backend>, ie
nnir-run-glimpse in your case.  The backend function massages the
query a bit and then runs glimpse (or waissearch, or whatever), then
parses the output of that and returns an alist of article number and
file name or suchlike.

I think it might be sufficient to just chop off the `.gz' from the
file name at the appropriate point.

I think you will be able to understand the function quite easily: the
output of glimpse is massaged in an understandable way into something
which looks like Lisp and is then evaled.

kai
-- 
A preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.