From: Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>
To: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Xapian locking errors with custom query parser
In-Reply-To: <8762rq8byr.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
References: <87d3nhe3g9.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
	<AANLkTinW_n+zMtLC-fy=naUGsAiFDwdd-mAqSWEDvF=W@mail.gmail.com>
	<AANLkTinPph9Lj8h3UztQ74qMaaBVKkXB0rbiLeTX2GmW@mail.gmail.com>
	<87lj0m8ki5.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
	<20110311024730.GA31011@mit.edu>
	<8762rq8byr.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5-103-g1253785 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:58:43 +0100
Message-ID: <87k4g6vxrw.fsf@steelpick.2x.cz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Cc: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Precedence: list

On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Carl Worth wrote:
> I've finally had a chance to start looking at this.

[...]

> 1. For "new" search features (ADJ,NEAR,etc.) I do not have a strong
>    interest in compatibility with Xapian.
> 
>    I was very careful when I wrote the documentation for the notmuch
>    search syntax to only document features that I had used and tested,
>    and that I was sure I wanted. (I was already thinking forward to
>    perhaps writing a custom query parser at some point.)
> 
>    So you should really use our existing documentation as the
>    guide. Please implement and test what it says.
> 
>    Beyond that, if you want to add additional features not mentioned in
>    our documentation, then feel free to, and there's no good reason not
>    to be Xapian compatible. But I also don't think there's a strong
>    reason that we have to be compatible.

Additionally, I'd suggest to support value range queries for dates with
".." syntax. Besides that some users may relay on this syntax, I use
date searches a lot and with custom query parser I have to type
"after:yesterday", which is unnecessarily long. I wish that
"yesterday..", which is much easier to type, would do the same.
Similarly, "mon..wed" would be easier to type than "after:mon
before:wed". What do you think?

-Michal