Re: [PATCH 3/3] search: rectify comment (rt: documented since 738c4a65719e)

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Štěpán Němec <stepnem@smrk.net> wrote:
> Fixes: 738c4a65719e ("www: various help text updates")
> ---
> On a related note, there's this comment in LeiXSearch.pm:312:
> 
>   # this should really be rt: (received-time), but no stable
>   # public-inbox releases support it, yet.
>   my $dt = 'dt:'.strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S', gmtime($lr)).'..';
> 
> So I went all "hey, it's been 3 releases with rt:, let's do this",
> and suddenly, `lei up` stopped getting any updates :-]

> The problem is that the date syntax handling for d:, dt: and rt: is not
> the same (date_parse_prepare in Search.pm), which doesn't seem ideal to
> me, either, but maybe that's intentional/necessary?

Yeah, probably: "rt:$lr.."; is correct.

It's historical baggage since rt: wasn't really used until we
got IMAP (2020); and we didn't have user-friendly approxidate
parsing until 2021.

d: and dt: had to be at least usable before 2021, so it's more
usable in "raw" form.

It's expensive to reindex so it's not something I'm inclined to
force users into doing, either...

d: was a short-sighted mistake and redundant.  I suppose we
could stop indexing d: at some point (like we do with --skip-docdata)
and translate all (not just most) d: into dt: in the parser.

> On a totally unrelated note, this patch is a nice example of how
> --diff-algorithm=histogram (which I use by default) sometimes produces
> diffs that are both longer and more confusing than with any other
> (git-provided) algorithm:

Heh, I've never touched --diff-algorithm.  But I sometimes pipe
messages to `lei rediff -W' or `lei rediff -U100' to get more
context.

I hope to add support for rediff to the WWW UI once coderepo
integration is improved.