bug search and source package names

[Robert Collins]

Hi, as you may have noticed, bug search in Launchpad is not as fast as
you might wish :). One of the contributing factors to the search
performance is that we do a substring match for package names.

We're looking at schema changes and additional short-term solutions
(long term we're moving to a dedicated search engine such as Lucene),
but I'm wondering - how important is this substring matching?

What do I mean by this? If you type 'ibche' into the bug search for
Ubuntu it will time out. But if it didn't timeout it would find all
bugs on libchewing (because ibche is a substring on libchewing).

If Ubuntu as a whole is open to this being removed temporarily(*) then
we can drop some representative queries down from 7 seconds to 380ms
with relatively little effort. We may be able to achieve this sort of
result with more significant effort - but if its not actually a
valuable feature, its much more efficient to disable it for a while.

-Rob

(*): a year or maybe two. We hope to get to an overhaul of our search
engine late 2011, and I'm positive we could reestablish this then if
desirable.