Namazu-devel-en(old)

[Olivier Thereaux <ot@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Philip. Thanks for your answer. I'll try to clarify and develop a bit.


On Wed, Sep 26, 2001, Philip S Tellis wrote:
> I don't think I understand what you mean by `query has to be in the
> keyword field'.  AFAIK, the query terms can be anywhere in the body of
> the document searched, not necessarily in the keyword field.  Also, your
> link doesn't work (yoda.zoy.org does not have a dns entry), so I can't
> see what you want me to.

By "query has to be in the keyword field", I mean that you can't split
you query into several fields. options like +subject:foo are crucial for
me, and I want my users to be able to use it without learning the
syntax.

See http://natto.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/~ot/search.html if zoy.org DNS is
broken where you are.

 
> What syntax is this?  

Header search.

> I've been using namazu for quite some time, and
> all my users took straight to it.

Lucky you! :) Seriously, the searc hservice I'd like to build is for the
(very) general public, and I know 90% of them do not want to learn
namazu's syntax to search the mail archive.

>  I didn't give anyone any training,
> they just intuitively knew how to search.
> http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~etu/ is an example.  See the search box on the
> top left.

Well, can't connect (let's consider ourselves lucky we can talk via
e-mail) to your web server from here (japan), sorry.

> >From namazu-cmd.c:
>     if (getenv("QUERY_STRING") && getenv("SCRIPT_NAME")) {

Yes. Got that one. 


> > 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.
> 
> Well, you don't really have to rewrite everything.  Dig into the source
> for a while.  It isn't that well commented, but the code is legible, and
> not too hard to understand if you know C.

Perfectly right (I'm in the code right now, after months of "user
experience", it's about time), but only if you want to write someting in
C. Not that I don't like C, but the client-server architecture makes you
free to choose which language you want to work with.

By the way, I've just been told another argument in favour to
client-server (and against CGI) : the fork for the cgi can be very
memory-costly, especially with multi-thread servers such as jigsaw.

Thanks.

-- 
Olivier