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@ mleku
2025-03-12 08:08:20
no, it's just an API detail
instead of returning events, the filter and fulltext search endpoints are specced to return simple lists of events in whatever expected sort order (i'm thinking to put the since/until/sort as parameters to the endpoint, because currently they are by default ascending order, which people may not want, in theory they could even be further sorted by npub, or kind
the reason for changing the API to only return event IDs is that pushes the query state problem for pagination back on the client, the relay doesn't need to additionally keep track of the state of recent history of queries to enable pagination, and i don't like that shit anyway because it inherently is inconsistent, as in, the query could return more events at any moment afterwards, so what do we do if we push pagination on the relay? do we make it update those things? then the client will get out of sync as well
implicitly any query with a filter that has no "until" on it searches until a specific moment in time, the time at which the relay receives the query, and the identical query 10 seconds later could have more events at least in the space since that time, not to mention it may get older events that match pushed to it by spiders or whatever in between
so, i say, fuck this complication, you just make an index on event IDs to event serials and then you search the indexes created by the filter fields, and then find the event ID table and pull every one of those out, and return them sorted in either ascending or descending order that they were stored on the relay (which is mostly actual chronological order)
idk, maybe i should add a timestamp to that index so this invariant can be enforced
anyway, i'm interested to hear other opinions about why the relay should implement filter api differently than i described, but i have thought a lot about it and i'm leaning very much towards returning IDs so the client manages their cache state instead of pushing that on the relay to give people their precious pagination
i already got too much complexity in here