[PATCH] Add search_type url parameter

[Kevin Morris]

No problem; I love to help where I can!

To address your two points:

1. There is no particular reason for `rpc` and `web` being chosen; I just
needed separate values for this patch to be tested with. I'm up to renaming
them to anything if we decide to use `search_type`.
2. It would not be much more work to add the quoted stanza -- I had an idea
to at one point, but just decided to back off from it; figured just
introducing the patch would get some conversation about it on the ML. I'll
start working on a follow-up patch that implements this as well.

The refraining from #2 is due to me being a bit worried due to it changing
how the API behaves, didn't think about the complete picture ("arch linux"
second_keyword). I'll start working on that now.

My tasks:

1. Rename search_type values to something more sensible (waiting on this
for feedback from ML)
2. Implement support for quoted strings in the search arg: "arch linux".
Quoted keywords will be taken literally -- that is, "arch linux" would
trigger a search for the literal 'arch linux' string.

Thanks for the follow-up, Lukas; I'm on it!


On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 4:46 PM Lukas Fleischer <lfleischer at archlinux.org>
wrote:

> Hi Kevin,
>
> Thanks for the patch!
>
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 19:36:01, Kevin Morris wrote:
> > This commit introduces new functionality: When `search_type` is `web`,
> > search behavior matches aurweb's HTML search page.
> >
> > New parameters: `search_type`
> > Valid search_type values: `rpc` (default), `web`
> >
> > The `rpc` search type uses the existing legacy search method.
> >
> > The `web` search type clontes the web-based aurweb search page's behavior
> > as closely as possible (see note at the bottom of this message).
> >
> > The following example searches for packages that contain `blah` AND
> `abc`:
> >
> https://aur.archlinux.org/rpc/?v=5&type=search&search_type=web&arg=blah%20abc
> >
> > The legacy method still searches for packages that contain 'blah abc':
> > https://aur.archlinux.org/rpc/?v=5&type=search&arg=blah%20abc
> >
> https://aur.archlinux.org/rpc/?v=5&type=search&search_type=rpc&arg=blah%20abc
>
> Before having a look at the implementation, is there any reason the two
> search types are called "rpc" and "web" (other than "rpc" is how the RPC
> interface used to behave and "web" is how the RPC interface used to
> behave)? If not, I think we should choose a different naming that is
> more intuitive and self-explanatory.
>
> Going a step further, would it be much more work to instead make the
> interface more powerful, use conjunctive search by default and perform
> exact matches for phrases put in quotes, such as
>
>     "arch linux" package
>
> matching everything that contains the strings "arch linux" and
> "package"? With that, we wouldn't even have to distinguish different
> search types (but we may need to bump the API version).
>
> Best regards,
> Lukas
>


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