We use "boolean" to describe fields that should generate terms
literally without stemming or phrase splitting. This terminology
might not be ideal but it is already enshrined in
notmuch-search-terms(7).
Anything that is quoted or not purely word characters is considered a
phrase. Phrases are not stemmed, because the stems do not have
positional information in the database. It is less efficient to scan
the term twice, but it avoids a second pass to add prefixes, so maybe
it balances out. In any case, it seems unlikely query parsing is very
often a bottleneck.
All operations and (Xapian) fields will eventually have an entry in
the prefixes table. The flags field is just a placeholder for now, but
will eventually distinguish between various kinds of prefixes.
There is not much of a parser here yet, but it already does some
useful error reporting. Most functionality sketched in the
documentation is not implemented yet; detailed documentation will
follow with the implementation.
