Laying QuickSearch to rest

[Gervase Markham]

Andreas Franke wrote:
> not sure whether my I am supposed to participate
> in this thread, but in case you care, here it goes...

Of course you are :-) I just thought you'd gone.

> If the primary goal is still met (and having either
> SimpleSearch or Myk's full text search on the front
> page instead would seem to satisfy it), then replacing
> QuickSearch on the front page is fine with me.

OK. I think we should do that, then. I believe Myk's search is more 
single-box Google-like, and therefore better fits the criteria for what 
we want on the front page.

> If I did not misunderstand him, at least Bradley seems 
> to agree with me about the second goal of having a 
> powerful search textbox readily available for advanced
> users.  So if there is a replacement that is (almost) 
> as powerful as quicksearch, then I'm also fine with 
> moving quicksearch to contrib, for example.

So we move a fulltext search box to the front page, and work on 
extending it with other QuickSearch-like syntax. In the mean time, we 
leave QuickSearch where it is until that's done. Sound good?

> I think the lack of integration is a consequence of
> the JavaScript requirement.  It was long consensus
> that the way to solve this was to port it to perl.
> I don't think that I should be blamed that this 
> never got checked in despite of a perl implementation
> being available at http://mozilla.flowerday.cx since 
> 2002-05-22 (see comments #27, #28 and #76 in bug 70907).

Yes - there's no blame attached to you for this not happening. We suck.

> The alternative path suggested in this discussion seems
> to be to first replace the javascript tool with the
> full text search perl tool, and then extend that with
> the perl-equivalent of quicksearch in a more intuitive
> syntax.

That sounds like a good plan to me.

> That's true.  And in all probability I won't be able to 
> devote much time to it in the future either.  The other
> question is, what would you expect from a maintainer?
> The last patches I submitted have been lying around
> since 2001-10-04 (fix #1, bug 102618, comment #6; ok
> there is even a better fix available by now), 
> and 2002-11-21 (bug 107860, comment #8).  

<looks> Again, we suck.

> I doubt very
> much that this discussion is meant to encourage me to
> send all kinds of review requests to various developers.

Actually, I guess it has sat around because no-one was asked to review 
it. Ah, well. No use crying over spilt milk.

Gerv