I think this is a good idea! LuSolr ;) (kidding) I agree with all of your points Yonik.
What do other people think...? Mike On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Yonik Seeley <[email protected]> wrote: > I've started to think that a merge of Solr and Lucene would be in the > best interest of both projects. > > Recently, Solr as pulled back from using Lucene trunk (or even the > latest version), as the increased amount of change between releases > (and in-between releases) made it impractical to deal with. This is a > pretty big negative for Lucene, since Solr is the biggest Lucene user > (where people are directly exposed to lucene for the express purpose > of developing search features). I know Solr development has always > benefited hugely from users using trunk, and Lucene trunk has now lost > all the solr users. > > Some in Lucene development have expressed a desire to make Lucene more > of a complete solution, rather than just a core full-text search > library... things like a data schema, faceting, etc. The Lucene > project already has an enterprise search platform with these > features... that's Solr. Trying to pull popular pieces out of Solr > makes life harder for Solr developers, brings our projects into > conflict, and is often unsuccessful (witness the largely failed > migration of FunctionQueries from Solr to Lucene). For Lucene to > achieve the ultimate in usability for users, it can't require Java > experience... it needs higher level abstractions provided by Solr. > > The other benefit to Lucene would be to bring features to developers > much sooner... Solr has had features years before they were developed > in Lucene, and currently has more developers working with it. Esp > with Solr not using Lucene trunk, if a Solr developer wants a feature > quickly, they cannot add it to Lucene (even if it might make sense > there) since that introduces a big unpredictable lag - when that > version of Lucene make it's way into Solr. > > The current divide is a bit unnatural. For maximum benefit of both > projects, it seems like Solr and Lucene should essentially merge. > Lucene core would essentially remain as it is, but: > 1) Solr would go back to using Lucene's trunk > 2) For new Solr features, there would be an effort to abstract it such > that non-Solr users could use the functionality (faceting, field > collapsing, etc) > 3) For new Lucene features, there would be an effort to integrate it into > Solr. > 4) Releases would be synchronized... Lucene and Solr would release at > the same time. > > -Yonik >
