You ask if this makes sense. No, not really. I don't know the details of the purpose of the compound file implementation so this may be my problem.
The purpose of the compound file implementation is to minimize the number of open files that an IndexReader must keep open. Instead of 7 + the number of indexed fields files per segement, only a single file must be kept open per segement. This helps applications which keep lots of unoptimized indexes open. (It also, and this is more common, helps folks who open a new IndexReader for each query and don't close it. In this case, opening fewer files gives the garbage collector time to close files before the process runs into its file descriptor limit, inducing a flurry of but reports about "too many open files".)
Does that make any more sense?
However, from earlier posts of yours, it seems that the Directory implementation classes such as OutputStream et al are being deprecated and replaced by others, so it may very well be that DbDirectory needs to be rewritten when these changes are finalized.
These changes are back-compatible: the old classes and methods are still there and interoperate with the new but are deprecated. You might wait until there is a Lucene release with the new API in it before you update DbDirectory. To move to the new API, all that should be required is changing your subclass of InputStream to instead subclass BufferedIndexInput, and also change your subclass of IndexOutput to instead subclass BufferedIndexOutput. You'll also need to add a length() method to your BufferedIndexInput subclass, instead of setting a protected length field in the constructor. That's it.
The revision of the API was primarily to make buffering optional. We could have left the buffered implementation names the same, but then the classes would be named poorly and it also seemed like an opportunity to remove the name clash with java.io.
Doug
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