It is possible to cache a Regexp object, but I'm not sure what happens
if e.g. that object remains in cache across two different Ruby versions.
Caching a string seems to raise fewer questions.
Ditto for ending with \b.
Consider muting the phrase "(hot take)". I stipulate it is reasonable
to enter this with the default "match whole word" behavior. Under the
old behavior, this would be encoded as
\b\(hot\ take\)\b
However, if \b is before the first character in the string and the first
character in the string is not a word character, then the match will
fail. Ditto for after. In our example, "(" is not a word character, so
this will not match statuses containing "(hot take)", and that's a very
surprising behavior.
To address this, we only add leading and trailing \b to keywords that
start or end with word characters.
There are two motivations for this:
1. It looks like we're going to add other features that require
server-side storage (e.g. user notes).
2. Namespacing glitchsoc modifications is a good idea anyway: even if we
do not end up doing (1), if upstream introduces a keyword-mute feature
that also uses a "KeywordMute" model, we can avoid some merge
conflicts this way and work on the more interesting task of
choosing which implementation to use.
David Yip