On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 03:02:22AM +0100, Jukka Zitting wrote: > > Please give me two to three months to make the next dev release of > > KinoSearch. > > What will happen then?
The next dev release of KS will present real world implementations of many designs that have been discussed in Lucene and Lucy forums over the last year. Some might see that as "progress". ;) > When and how is Lucy development going to start? It *is* actively progressing. It's just that neither you nor Grant are willing to acknowledge that any of the design work I just did (in happy collaboration with Java Lucene devs) applies to Lucy. Please go read <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1458> and see if you can still assert after you read it that no work is being done on Lucy. I warn you, it is a long thread. :) > You mention that in many cases other forums have been better for > discussing related design issues. What's the benefit of keeping the > Lucy project alive if there's next to no code or even discussion > there? The proposal remains sound, and there is a deep hunger out there for a solid C IR library similar to Lucene. The KS-then-Lucy progression is the fastest and best way to get there. Things would have gone more smoothly and quickly if Dave Balmain had been able to contribute more, but even with that setback, we will still reach the finish. > I'm sure that everyone here would love to see Lucy become more active. > How could we help make that happen? Help Mike McCandless and Jason Rutherglen finish up their work on the designs we've all been discussing. This is a multi-way collaboration, and Lucy benefits when I'm able to study alternatate implementations, just as Java Lucene benefits from being able to see what other projects have done. Cross-pollination has worked very well in the past. The indexing speedups a while back started with McCandless riffing on the KinoSearch merge model. (He followed that up with plenty of interesting innovating on his own.) > As a wild idea: would there be interest in bringing the KinoSearch > codebase over to Apache through incubation? My main reservation is that I really want to see KS and Lucy play out sequentially, because I want Lucy to benefit from having seen how the features now in KS work in the real world. There's no sane versioning under Perl/CPAN. You can't move from Lucy version 1 to Lucy version 2 without screwing over your users, and therefore I don't want to merge the two projects into one namespace. If we did that, the unified project has to stay as an "alpha" for that much longer, and it never really gets the benefit of seeing how a real-world release goes. If, then, we're proceeding sequentially as I recommend, I don't see how putting KS through incubation does anything but slow us down. All we're doing is adding extra hoops to jump through. It might be politically expedient, but the engineer in me rebels at the waste, as does the loyal employee. >From my perspective, what we have is an optics problem. I'm working full time, and I've been plenty active in the Lucene forums, but you and Grant only see a big fat zero. :( Marvin Humphrey
