On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 11:14 +0100, 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. > > 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. As a variant of both of the above, would it be possible to use the server-side substring matching to return "regex canididates" which are then further filtered by the regex engine locally? The first implementation would use whatever (first or longest) block of straight text is present in the regex for substring searching, and use the results from the server as the input to the actual regex engine. This will improve the speed of the search somewhat, leaving full optimization for the future. jf -- John Franklin <franklin@xxxxxxxxx>
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