On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 06:46:06PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
Any objections to me completely removing Search::InvertedIndex support from OpenGuides and just using Plucene?
What concrete reasons are there to drop support for S::I? Myself (and for the Debian packages) I would not want S::I support to go away just yet; as others have said, Plucene introduces a heap of new module dependencies which I'll need to work on for Debian packaging; this is something I wanted to do at some point but I was hoping to have a bit more breathing space.
Does retaining S::I support impose a significant hassle now? IMO strongarming users into using the "better" programming solution is a bad thing; OpenGuides is a fast enough moving target as it is, and at the end of the day we want to be able to run a stable, maintainable system (I don't consider CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS.pm capable of doing this, for the record). There is of course no reason not to develop better searching code, and I recognise that this is an urgent problem as regards the London server, but since we already support both search systems, is there really a need to throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I am also concerned that we might lock ourselves into Plucene and subsequently find it an abandoned project and that better things are out there (I'm not making a statement of the current situation because I haven't done a survey of the current search toolkits available). I know that Simon has stepped away from maintaining his modules, so it seems foolish to force our users to use Plucene with no alternative at this stage.
These are some initial thoughts. If I come up with anything more once I've had a chance to think it through, look through the code, and be sober, I'll follow up.
Cheers,
Dom.