Bug search no longer does substring matching of source package names

As part of improving performance we have disabled the substring matching of source package names. This fixes bug 268508 and bug 607960. However its a slightly contentious issue – opinions vary about whether bug 268508 is a valid bug or not.

So we have only disabled it – the code is still present and when we have more leeway on the performance of bug searching we’ll revisit this and look into some design and UI analysis to decide whether substring matching of this sort should be done or not.

For now though, there should be less timeouts in bug searches.

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2 Responses to “Bug search no longer does substring matching of source package names”

  1. Tony Says:

    I think substring matching should be included, but be given the following precedence:

    1) exact match
    2) substring match at beginning or end of project name
    3) substring match in middle of name
    4) repeat the above with “fuzzy” matches (similar spellings)

    Perhaps providing a collapsible list, or AJAX search result filter for dis/allowing substring matching would be an acceptable compromise…?

  2. Samuel Bronson Says:

    Probably substring matching on package names shouldn’t be done for every query word, yes… but it would be good to allow something at least as powerful to be done explicitly — perhaps something like package:.*quit.* (to use bug 268508 as an example) would be a good way to do a regular expression match against the entire package name (i.e., with implicit ^ and $ anchors)?

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