Namazu-devel-en(old)

[Olivier Thereaux <ot@xxxxxxx>]

Hi.

Lately, I have tested and tried namazu, and I would like to use it to
index and search a (large) mail archive.

I have a few "wishes" that I will summarize here.


Number one:

For mail/news documents, date search is, currently, not very good, and
very unpleasant to use. Right now, if you want to search by dates, you
have to match date = {(month or month or month) and year}, for example.
Having a way to search documents "between this date and this date" would
be a great improvement, and a more "natural" way to work.


Number two: 

namazu.cgi is good, and flexible, but I don't like it. My main reproach
(and the reason why I will not use it) is that all the query *has* to be
in the keyword field. I would prefer (because it's better for users, as
they don't have to learn the syntax) something like:

http://yoda.zoy.org/~yoda/search.html

As you can see, in this interface header search is possible directly,
whereas with namazu.cgi, one needs to learn the syntax (and believe me,
many people don't, and this is why "simple" search engines are popular
these days).

I wanted to use namazu as a back-end (calling it from a script which
re-builds a query namazu understands), but if I do this, All I get is:
	You should use "namazu.cgi" instead of "namazu" command.

I understand namazu developers want to advertize namazu.cgi, but using
namazu itself shouldn't be forbidden. 
Honestly, it makes me think of M$-like behaviour. 
Is there a work-around? If there isn't, please remove this restriction.



Number three : 

Again, namazu.cgi is good, but not good for everyone. Some people may
want the cgi to output xml, and not html, but they can't. I would like
to tie namazu to a jigsaw web server, and improve session handling,
cacheing, etc... But I can't. What I'm saying is that namazu IS a good
engine, but being tied to the binary or the cgi is not "cool" for
developers, and having to re-write everything is a waste.

A *great* thing would be to develop, as a base for both namazu and
namazu.cgi, or in parallel to namazu, a client-server module that
various clients, including namazu.cgi and namazu, could call.


Thank you for reading. I hope you'll find that interesting, and I hope
those wishes can come true, someday.

-- 
Olivier