GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 758902
provide search
Last modified: 2021-06-10 11:04:09 UTC
We store channel logs. It is a common use case to go back to a conversation one had about foobar, but currently the only ay to get back to it is to scroll back. Wireframes to come.
It's quite a while ago now, but here's a search wire I did when search was previously discussed. https://wiki.gnome.org/BastianIlsø/Polari/Search
Yeah, this has been on the wish list for a long time - I started some initial work a while ago, but it became clear that TpLogger really is not up to the job: if you have empathy around, select "Previous conversations" from the app menu, choose "anyone", "anything" and "anytime", start a search and weep ... Carlos Garnacho started working on a tracker-miner, which means we will finally be able to address this.
Created attachment 321257 [details] polari-search-history-rev10.png Here's an experimental proposal. In comparison to revision 9 the biggest difference is that the proposal goes beyond just "search" - searching happens from a dedicated "conversation history" view. Making a separate view was motivated by some thoughts I had about draft 9 design: - The search transforms your sidebar into a list of rooms with matchin results. To me it's not very clear how to get back, unless you add a back button or so in the headerbar. - There is no need to have an entry area when you perform a search. Showing it while searching seems confusing. - The search bar takes up some precious UI space of the sidebar for the primary use case of polari (switching rooms, chatting), especially if it's position is "fixed" (which to me seems most intuitive). Furthermore I'm proposing to use the main view to show a list of conversations ordered by recency. It seems useful to me - As a shortcut to access recent conversations based on who you spoke to and without the need to recall what channel it happened in. I'll probably drop this in #gnome-design later, but opinions and comments appreciated here too.
(In reply to Bastian Ilsø from comment #3) > I'll probably drop this in #gnome-design later, but opinions and comments > appreciated here too. I don't really have cycles to spare on anything post-3.20 at the moment, so just a quick comment: One of the trickier aspects I see is the presentation of results - one the one hand it is important to provide context instead of just the matching messages, on the other hand it needs to scale to potentially huge amounts of history. I'm not sure a giant conversation log of 50,000 lines(*) is a good way to navigate results. A quick test with a 500,000 lines log in a plain text view (i.e. no tags etc.) at least seems reasonably fast, but still ... (*) that's just a number I see here, it will be significantly higher for folks that have been having around on IRC 24-7 for 10 years
I'm not entirely sure about using a separate view for history. It feels like it's duplicating existing UI - the default view *is* the history, after all. It would be good to try and be consistent with the standard search pattern for GNOME 3 applications - search in place, with a drop down that you can toggle and global search. Some experiments: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/polari/search-experiments.png
Some new mockups, which are evolved from the experiments I linked to in the previous comment: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/polari/search-aday.png
I like the direction where this is going. Do I understand correctly that if a result belongs to a currently joined channel, the "normal" chat log is used for the result as well? If so, do we need some way to jump back to the end (in case we insert a year worth of logs to get to the result)? Also one party-pooing note (sorry) - the real name is not information we have readily available, neither in logs nor in the list of channel members. Fetching it for all users (one-by-one, unfortunately) in a channel is something we have tried to avoid the annoying spinner in the user list details, but it's just unfeasibly slow ...
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Polari, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/polari/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.