Subject: Re: [MORG] I-D Action:draft-ietf-morg-fuzzy-search-01.txt

From: Timo Sirainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:13:25 -0400

This should describe pretty much what we talked about in last IETF:
Server can do pretty much anything it wants for search keys inside
FUZZY.

One TODO item though:

> UIDs, sequences, modification sequences: [[anchor6: TODO: There is
>    probably not much point in matching these fuzzily.  Could it be a
>    MUST NOT for clients to use them inside FUZZY?]]

I don't really have any thoughts on this. Seems pointless, but then
again maybe it might make something easier to allow them to be matched
(exactly?)

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:18:24 -0400

> again maybe it might make something easier to allow them to be matched

I think the point is that the server decides what "fuzzy" means, and
that the decision may vary from search key to search key -- including
doing an exact match because it thinks that "fuzzy" isn't meaningful
for that particular key.  I would never want a client to be unable to
say something like this:
  SEARCH FUZZY (FROM "siranan" UID 123:217)
...even though the client could put the UID item outside the FUZZY
scope.  It's up to the server how to handle it; I don't want the
client to be trying to second-guess what the server will do.

Maybe a change to the text will help.  How about this?:

OLD
Fuzzy matching is not limited to just string matching.  All search
keys SHOULD be matched fuzzily, although what exactly that means for
different search keys is left up to implementations to decide.  Some
suggestions are given below.

NEW
Fuzzy matching is not limited to just string matching.  All search
keys SHOULD be matched fuzzily, although what exactly that means for
different search keys is left up to server implementations to decide
-- including deciding that fuzzy matching is meaningless for a
particular key, and falling back to exact matching).  Some suggestions
are given below.

And then maybe:
NEW
 UIDs, sequences, modification sequences: These are examples of keys
for which exact matching is probably what makes sense.  Alternatively,
a server might choose, for instance, to expand a UID range by 5% on
each side.

---
What do you think?

Barry

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From: Timo Sirainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:22:21 -0400

> a server might choose, for instance, to expand a UID range by 5% on

Yes, looks good. I added those changes to my copy (minus the extra ")").

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From: Timo Sirainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:51:15 -0400

Pretty minor thing, but would FUZZY capability be better than
SEARCH=FUZZY? Somehow I thought there were more SEARCH= capabilities,
but I can't seem to find any. And FUZZY isn't really SEARCH-specific
anyway, since it works with SORT, THREAD, etc.

And that reminds me, should it be possible to return relevancy values
also for THREAD? I guess that would require ESORT-like ETHREAD
extension.