Re: Fixing search.debian.org
Can someone of you please comment on the viability of Xapian,
or maybe Lucene?
Xapian is a very fast library and supports advanced query syntax. Its
corresponding search application Omega is easy to customize and
deploy. Limitations include lack of support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean,
and summary results only show the top of the result page instead of
the relevant portion. Xapian has a C++ heritage, but includes bindings
for several languages. Here is an example of a Xapian query running
against a copy of the debian-user mailing list archive. [1]
Lucene is a very fast library and has significantly more mindshare
than Xapian. Its corresponding search application, Nutch, is not as
polished as Omega. Nutch is a Java servlet application not currently
packaged for Debian. Lucene has a Java heritage but has ports to
various languages.
I feel Xapian and Lucene are the two leading Free Software search
libraries [2] and both could be viable for Debian provided
sufficient elbow grease is also applied. These comments reflect
my personal opinion only and do not represent the positions of any
organization that I am affiliated with.
Jeff Breidenbach
<jab@debian.org>
[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/omega/omega?P=yogurt&DB=debian-user@lists.debian.org
[2]
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/tools-opensource.html
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