Re: REALLY adding search to balsa

[Emmanuel <e allaud wanadoo fr>]

On 2001.12.17 15:30 John Rowe wrote:
> 
>> Could you tell me what you are planning for your lib ?
>> In fact I think my code is not as generic as it should (for example I 
>> think your library uses sieve format?).
> 
> Thanks for the reply Emmanuel.
> 
> I agree that flexibility is the key. It also needs to be simple to use
> for the 99% of people who will never enter a Boolean in their life,
> let alone a regexp, but still want some of the capabilities they
> provide. (It's tricky to handle both!) A Free Software project like 
> Balsa should have best-of-class search.
> 
> Right now my library supports text searches with booleans, negation,
> parentheses, lists (any two of..), phrases, regular expressions,
> case (in)sensitivity, smart spaces and beginning/end of or exact word.
> 
> Arbitrary subsearches over any combination of Fields (Sender, Body, etc.)
> can be combined so you can search for:
> 
> Subject contains chocolate || (Any two of :   (Body contains any two of 
> (foo bar baz) but does not contain fredo)   (Sender was not Tim || the 
> Subject does not contain "hello mum")
>   (Subject contains astrophysics)
> )
> 
> For each target (ie mail message) it tries the cheaper fields first
> and it only asks for each field once. There's also support for
> numerical ranges so we could have a "less than n bytes" option,
> 
> The above all works but could do with some more testing.  It's very
> extensible and I'm certainly open to ideas to make it more flexible.
> 
> I need to put in a date search and catagory matching and at the moment
> I'm writing the GTK front-end. The default panel will omit the
> regexp-type options and possibly the boolean and/or start/end/exact
> word options but that will be configurable.
> 
> It all works by "quantified lists" (is here a proper term for
> this?) where every expression is a list of sub-expressions and a
> threshold of how many have to be true for the expression to be
> true. This lets me have a simple choice for the non-advanced panel
> that looks a bit like:
> 
> * Require all the above words
> o Require at least __1__ word
> 
> Most people can understand that and also what it means if you replace
> '1' by '2'. If you enter a boolean text search it parses it to a list.
> 
> The same syntax is used when combining searches over different fields.
> 
> I don't see IMAP searching as posing any huge problems.
> 
> I see that the latest beta has some searching capabilities but given
> the comment of somebody alse on this list I haven't dared try it! The
> interface between my library and the application is extremely simple
> so it would be trivial to give it a go.
> 
> If there's a realistic chance of getting it into balsa I could get the 
> front-end
> ready quite quickly.
> 

All this sounds really great (but the fact that my work seems really 
useless with yours ;-). I think we should have a look to your lib and see 
if we can integrate it to balsa (Pawel ?). Anyway I'll have a look (be 
patient, I'm a bit overworked and Christmas is just beginning :), and I 
can help if you need it.
Bye
Manu