On Mar 7, 2009, at 3:54 AM, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
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". ;)
That is progress on KS, not Lucy.
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. :(
It's not that you aren't doing good stuff Marvin. You are. I love
your discussions on Lucene Java and you are no doubt doing interesting
stuff on KS. It's just that, as Jukka, has pointed out, Lucy has seen
absolutely zero of this effort for over three years. How long do we
hang on to your promise? And, it is only you doing so. That is not a
community and not a definition of an Apache project. It's fine for KS
b/c that doesn't live in Apache. It's not fine for Lucy, IMO.
Sorry. Heck, you and Nathan having a two person discussion on Lucy-
dev on a regular basis would be enough to satisfy this.
-Grant
