Bug#103975: Sherlock searchability (Mozilla 'Search' sidebar)

[Kevin Turner <acapnotic@foobox.net>]

Package: www.debian.org
Severity: wishlist

Hi.  I think it'd be just swell if you could search packages.debian.org
and the bugs database through the 'Search' sidebar in Mozilla.  And, in
fact, one can without too much effort.  (See attatched Sherlock
extension files.)  But it would work even BETTER with just a little help
from the server side of things.

All we needs is a few HTML comments thrown into the output stream, one
before and after each result in the list.  e.g. <!-- resultItemStart -->
and <!-- resultItemEnd -->, or <!-- Chocolate! --> <!-- Vanilla! -->,
just so long as these identifiers are distinct.

For bugs, it'd also be handy to have a 'GET' interface that works the
same way the url-redirection queries work, i.e. have a single url that
you can perform a get-action on, with just one input parameter, which
may take the form of number/package/maint@email/from:sumbitter@email,
e.g.
 http://bugs.debian.org/supersearch?q=1235
 http://bugs.debian.org/supersearch?q=reportbug
doing the same thing as 
 http://bugs.debian.org/1235
 http://bugs.debian.org/reportbug

the reason for this being that these search gizmos are made to submit
get requests instead of doing URL construction.

Once this works well, the Mozilla maintainer may choose to include these
search extensions in the browser package, or the webmaster may put up a
little page with a javascript 'click here to install the debian package
search tab', as described on
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/search/technical.html

Thanks,

 - Kevin Turner
 <acapnotic@foobox.net>

(Note: sherlock is not a mozilla-specific thing, I think it was born in
MacOS and Konq might support it too, though I'm not sure.)

<SEARCH
    name="Debian packages"
    method="get"
    action="http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl";
    description="Search through the names and descriptions of packages in the whole Debian package database."
>

<INPUT name="keywords" user />
<INPUT name="searchon" value="all" />
<INPUT name="subword" value="1" />
# XXX - customize version
<INPUT name="version" value="all" />
<INPUT name="release" value="all" />

# XXX - ItemStart and ItemEnd markers suck.
<INTERPRET
    browserResultType = "result"
    resultListStart = "<table"
    resultListEnd = "</table"
    resultItemStart = '<tr VALIGN="top">'
    resultItemEnd = 'k)'
/>

</SEARCH>

<SEARCH
    name="Debian filenames"
    method="get"
    action="http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_contents.pl";
    description="Search for a filename in all Debian packages in the unstable i386 distribution."
>
    
<INPUT name="word" user />
<INPUT name="casesens" value="insensitive" />
# XXX - customize distro
<INPUT name="distro" value="unstable" />
# XXX - customize arch
<INPUT name="arch" value="i386" />
<INPUT name="incdirs" value="yes" />

# XXX - no tag marking item-start or end!
#     resultItemStart = "<b class=title"
#     resultItemEnd = '<hr size=1 width="100%" align=left>'
<INTERPRET
    browserResultType = "result"
    resultListStart = "<pre>"
    resultListEnd = "</pre>"
/>

</SEARCH>