Subject: Re: Can't get all search results
From: John Hansen <john@geeknet.com.au>
To: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: PostgreSQL www <pgsql-www@postgresql.org>
In-Reply-To: <200605161301.k4GD13Z26103@candle.pha.pa.us>
References: <200605161301.k4GD13Z26103@candle.pha.pa.us>
Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 01:26:48 +1000
Message-Id: <1147793208.7258.5.camel@barney.geeknet.com.au>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 09:01 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> John Hansen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 22:12 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > I can't get all May 2006 search results to show up on:
> > > 
> > > 	http://archives.postgresql.org/
> > > 
> > > If I search for "semaphore", I see only one entry for May 2006, while
> > > this shows three emails with that title from the patches list for May
> > > 7-8, 2006:
> > > 
> > > 	http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2006-05/index.php
> > > 
> > 
> > Aye, I'm aware of a problem with the sort by date functionality,... if
> > you look closer you will see that they appear among the last few
> > results.
> 
> Oh, I definately see some strange date ordering on the last page.  Can
> you explain how something as simple as a date sort could not work 100%?

Sure, the function that converts the webserver's response (the
last_modified header returned by a HEAD request to be precise) to a unix
timestamp, is by nature, somewhat uhmm,. unstable

'by nature' since there is no standard, an attempt has been made to
cover the most common response formats.

... John