Searching tickets

[Ben Gamari]

Simon Peyton Jones <simon.peytonjones at gmail.com> writes:

>>
>> I belive that the search bar at the top of
>> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/ only searches the issues'
>> title and description.
>>
>
> That is ... disappointing to say the least.
>
>> It is possible to search in comments via
>> https://gitlab.haskell.org/search?group_id=2&project_id=1&scope=notes.
>>
>
> Alas that interface has no way to sort by date or anything else -- as you
> say, not very useful.
>
Agreed, this is a pretty serious deficiency which I have run into quite
a bit. It's also quite perplexing as (at least on paper) sorting the
result set should be straightforward.

>> Sadly, searching for "Haskeline" here turns up over 300 results and none
>> of which are the ticket you are looking for
>>
>
> very very sadly
>
> These days, search is basically a solved problem.

As someone married to a professor of information retrieval, I can attest that
there remains no shortage of open questions. Broadly speaking, web
search today works in no small part by learning from users' responses to
rankings (e.g. so-called "click data"). This works remarkably well if
you have plenty of user data (e.g. Google). However, it is quite hard to
match the quality of click-driven rankings on small-scale,
domain-specific corpora where click data is generally not available in
sufficient quantity.

Regardless, GitLab is very much lacking in its search functionality, in
many ways falling short of even Trac. This is something that I wish they
would focus on; one would think there would be no shortage of
incentive given that the GitLab repository has over 300k tickets.

>> I tend to use google with the extra keyword site:
>> gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues, as it often has better search
>> results than gitlab itself. It doesn't work too well for very recent
>> tickets though
>>
>
> Yes: site:gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues haskeline
> -fspecialize-aggressively doesn't find it.  Not working well for recent
> tickets (this one is 2 weeks old) is a huge drawback.
>
> Boo.  Thanks for responses though
>
Yes, I wish I had a more helpful response.

Cheers,

- Ben
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 487 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20230124/51ae5221/attachment.sig>