Subject: Re: bug#65809: mumi: Add msg number and subject in search results when searching for subject:

From: Arun Isaac <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2023 11:48:16 +0100

Hi Gio,

Sorry for my late reply. I have been travelling the last week and am
just catching up on all my email.

> When searching for "subject:" it would be useful to have a speficic
> message number and subject along with (or in place of) the bug title.

This is actually difficult to do because of the way we index issues as
Xapian "documents".

First, a quick Xapian primer. Xapian has a bunch of documents each
associated with a set of terms. When a search query comes in, Xapian
decomposes the query into a list of terms and retrieves documents that
match those terms.

In our case, we index entire issues as Xapian documents; we don't index
each individual email message as its own Xapian document. This means
that an issue is the smallest unit we can address. We cannot address
each individual email message. So, localizing a subject to a specific
email message is difficult.

Maybe what you are looking for is some context in the search results to
know why that particular search result was produced. This can be done by
displaying a snippet of text from the issue with the search terms
highlighted. For a working demo of what I mean, see for example,
https://issues.genenetwork.org/search?query=database&type=all . Notice
how the search term "database" is highlighted in the search
results. This is relatively easy to do with Xapian, and indeed I do plan
to implement this at some point.

WDYT? Would this meet your needs?

Regards,
Arun