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by xwvvvvwx 3119 days ago
Code search in bitbucket server is dismal. All punctuation characters are removed. This includes colons, full stops, braces and underscores. This makes it close to useless for searching source code.

Regarding global refactorings think new language features or library versions.
2 comments
rbbitbucket 3118 days ago
Bitbucket PM here. Thanks for the feedback!

Support for punctuation in search is something we knew wasn't ideal when we first added code search. As with all software, there were some technical constraints that made it hard to do.

We plan to have support for full stops and underscores in a future version and are exploring how to best handle more longer term. Our focus, based on feedback, is on "joining" punctuation character to better allow searching for tokens. Support for a full range of characters threatens to blow out index sizes, but if we get more feedback on specific use cases we're always happy to consider them.

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mikepurvis 3119 days ago
That boggles the mind. Why wouldn't they just ship Hound or something else based on the Go regex search backend?
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rbbitbucket 3118 days ago
There's always a reason ;)

Being a self-hosted product we have to make tradeoffs for the thousands of people operating (scaling, upgrading, configuring, troubleshooting...) instances. In short, we try to keep the system architecture fairly simple using available technology and keeping the broad skillsets of admins in mind.

It was a somewhat difficult call to add ElasticSearch for it's broad search capability, but being used for other purposes helped justify it. Adding Hound or similar services that were considered would have added more to administrative complexity and wouldn't provide for a broader range of search needs.

We continue to iterate on search, making it better over time.

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mikepurvis 3115 days ago
A fair point, but I will just say that Hound is _astonishingly_ low maintenance. I set it up at my current employer like two years ago and have logged into that VM maybe twice in the entire time. It just hums along and answers thousands of requests a week with zero fuss.
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