[notmuch] [PATCH] Make the date parser nicer

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:55:00 -0800, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com> wrote:
> Very cool. Oh, if you've got commits that don't compile on their own,
> you should squash them together (or fix it in some other way). Makes
> bisecting easier in the future.

Makes sense. I am still quite new to git, so excuse those beginner's
lapses. Perhaps Carl could squash commits ec3c79a and 2565fc6 when (if?)
pulling, that would make every step compile IMHO.

> Also, cworth is on vacation this week, so we won't be seeing any
> merging to master...

No hurry :-). cworth will have to do quite some catching up when he
returns.

The one "disadvantage" my integration has over your original approach,
is that we now always require "date:XXX..YYY". A 'date:lastmonth' won't
work, it will need to be "date:lastmonth..today". The reason is that
xapian only seems to invoke the RangeParser when something of the format
'A..B' is passed as a parameter. So while we could get "date:..2005" to
work, "date:2005.." is not passed to the RangeParser handler, it seems.
 
We could ditch the "date:" prefix, but imho it is more consistent with
the other keywords to use it. I have no strong feelings about this.

It also still has the same limitation, in that it will not find emails with
a future timestamp (I use date:lastweek..5000 to get all mails with a
future stamp).

Sebastian