RFS: Xapian - Search engine library
I'm seeking a sponsor for packages for Xapian (http://www.xapian.org/).
I'm the main upstream developer of Xapian. Richard Boulton (another
Xapian developer) did the original packaging work, and more recently
I've been maintaining them. Details:
Package: Xapian (packaged as several debian packages, see below for list)
Version: 0.9.6
Licence: GPL
URL: http://www.xapian.org/
Description (from the main library package):
This package contains the core Xapian runtime library, and the Xapian query
parser library.
The Xapian search engine library is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit
to allow developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to
their own applications. It implements the probabilistic model of information
retrieval, and provides facilities for performing ranked free-text searches,
relevance feedback, phrase searching, boolean searching, stemming, and
simultaneous update and searching. It is highly scalable, and is capable of
working with collections containing many millions of documents.
The Xapian query parser is a flexible query parser, accepting a syntax
similar to that of popular web search engines, and converting this to a query
object suitable for use in the Xapian search engine library.
Xapian itself is written in C++ with a C++ API. The packages include
bindings for Python, Ruby, PHP4, PHP5, and Tcl, and a package for a CGI
front end and accompanying indexers (called "omega"). Here's the list
of packages:
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/libxapian-dev_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/libxapian11_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/xapian-doc_0.9.6-2_all.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/xapian-examples_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/xapian-tools_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/xapian-omega_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/php4-xapian_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/php5-xapian_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/python-xapian_0.9.6-2_all.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/python2.3-xapian_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/python2.4-xapian_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/libxapian-ruby1.8_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
http://xapian.org/debian/pool/0.9.6/binary/tclxapian_0.9.6-2_i386.deb
Previous versions of these have been available as an apt repository at
http://www.xapian.org/debian/ since September 2004, and are fairly
popular judging from the download logs. They're also available as a
backport for Debian stable, and versions for Ubuntu's breezy and dapper -
counting unique IPs downloading the 0.9.6-1 packages for each of these,
there have been over 100 downloads (I only uploaded 0.9.6-2 this morning).
The packages should conform to debian policy 3.7.2.0. I've also
attempted to follow the draft PHP policy for the PHP packages
(except where that's not possible because it describes how things might
work in future!)
The packages are free of lintian warnings. There's one lintian
informational message (if you pass "-I") which is for a man page
generated by help2man:
I: xapian-omega: hyphen-used-as-minus-sign usr/share/man/man1/omindex.1.gz:7
This looks like a (fairly minor) help2man bug - I'm intending to file a
bug report.
The packages build cleanly with pbuilder (that's how I built the
packages above). I've tried running piuparts on them, but couldn't
figure out how to get it to handle packages which depend on other
packages not in the archive. It didn't complain about the packages I
was able to test though.
There's a (rather old) RFP bug for Xapian:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=290426
As I've noted there, Wookey has agreed in principle to sponsor uploads,
but he's overloaded at present and looks likely to remaining that way
for quite a while. So I'm seeking an alternative sponsor, with Wookey's
blessing.
Let me know if you've any questions.
Cheers,
Olly
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