Re: IMAP server side search integration
On Monday, 05 September 2005 at 11:14, James Raftery wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:53:09AM -0700, Brendan Cully wrote:
> > 1. Silently treat the arguments to ~(b|h|H) as simple strings and pass
> > them to the server. You'd lose the ability to do full-text regular
> > expression searches on IMAP folders. On the other hand, client-side
> > searches are currently painful enough that probably no one does
> > them anyway.
>
> Please don't remove full-text regexp searches. Yes, they're very slow
> and very inefficient but in some cases they're the only way to find what
> you might be looking for. If a user is prepared to wait I think they
> should be permitted to.
>
> > 3. A modifier for ~b..., eg $~b or $~h, indicating that the parameters
> > are substrings rather than regular expressions. Would people
> > actually remember to use it or is it just a nuisance?
>
> This would be my preference.
I'm working on this now.
> How difficult would it be to silently use server-side substring
> searching if the user-supplied search pattern doesn't contain any regexp
> metacharacters ? In that case, the search modifier above would only be
> needed to force the search pattern to be evaluated as a substring.
My instinct is that this would cause confusion. I might be wrong
though. Let me do the explicit '$' modifier first and then we'll see.