Re: extra search flags and params? (ispatch, replycount, ...)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 12:10:28AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> Would they be useful?
> 
> It's not currently possible to quickly search for whether or not
> a term (e.g. patchid:) is present in a Xapian document.  Having
> the ability to do so would make it easier to find non-patch messages,
> or easily filter down to cover letters, bot replies, etc...

I understand the reasoning, but I'm not sure we should be trying too hard to
make public-inbox a patch tracking platform. What makes lei great is ability
to automatically find and retrieve entire threads -- I feel like we should
leave series tracking to other platforms that already exist (patchwork,
patchew, etc).

> I don't think any of these would be required to get "lei rediff"
> working on entire patchsets, though (it only does individual
> messages, currently).

Incidentally, I've recently discovered that relying on git-patch-id to match
commits to message archives has some important flaws. Linus was actually the
one who caused this when he recommended that maintainers switch to using the
"histogram" diff algorithm instead of the default ("myers").

This made me realize that there's actually a multitude of ways the same patch
can be represented (diff-algorithm, number of context lines, etc) that would
cause git-patch-id to return a different value for the exact same commit.

So, while I know that Linus doesn't want Link: entries in commits that just go
to the series, using the message-id remains the only mechanism to reliably
link commits to the series discussion.

-K