Bug#256283: lucene, pylucene & debian packaging

[Jeff Breidenbach <jeff@jab.org>]

I'm the maintainer of Debian's lucene package, and I noticed interest
in bringing pylucene into the distribution. [1] I am curious how that
might work.

One possibility is for Debian's lucene package to do both javac and
gcj compilation. It would provide both a java and native library
version of lucene. Then a separate pylucene package would handle swig
and creation of the python module. This would have the advantage of
making lucene available to C programmers as well as python
programmers.

So my questions are:

  1) Is this a reasonable approach? 

  2) I think it would work if the gcj step is simple and easily
     separable. It would not work if the lucene sources need to be
     patched in a pylucene specific way. I'm concerned about the
     lucene.patches file and wonder if they can be merged with lucene
     upstream or migrated to PyLucene.i

  3) Is someone willing to help? I'm interested in native compilation
     in Debian's lucene package, but definitely need assistance.

Cheers,
Jeff

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256283