I would like to offer a bit of perspective on why (IMHO) the Lucene.Net project has struggled. I am a former committer on Lucene.Net from years ago, and my participation fell off mostly due to the chosen strategy in maintaining a port of the Java-based Lucene library.
At the time I was a committer, .Net 2.0 had just been released (within 3 months, if I recall). In discussion among the community, I was an advocate for moving the Lucene.Net codebase to a more .Net-centric implementation. C# 2.0 had many improvements over the 1.1 version (i.e. generics), and I wanted our project to take advantage of those improvements. The discussion over future direction was more about logistics than philosophy. Community members who advocated against a .Net-optimized basis argued that keeping the Lucene.Net codebase on par line-by-line with the Java-based project would facilitate easier maintenance of the codebase over time; as the Java version received improvements, one could implement the same in C#, and the project would benefit all the same. There is some merit to the point from a theoretical standpoint, but in practicality it didn't hold true. While the Java-based version went down a path, the C# version continued to struggle to keep up. The philosophical discussion is important to consider: if the only purpose of the Lucene.Net codebase is to mirror the original Java-based version, what's the point of maintaining a replica? The best-case scenario is the introduction of unnecessary bugs in the ported codebase due to translation of the Java-based original files. This grows in significance over time as Java and C# become quite different languages with different runtime characteristics. At this stage, I would argue that mirroring the Java-based version in C# line-by-line carries more risk than it does benefit. And because of the current approach, the project is held back from community participation. Jeff Rodenburg Seattle, WA -----Original Message----- From: Simone Chiaretta [mailto:simone.chiare...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 10:10 AM To: lucene-net-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Lucene.NET Community Status > Why cannot we make a .NET version of Lucene that really follows the idioms of .NET (properties, generics, maybe even Linq)? -- Simone Chiaretta Microsoft MVP ASP.NET - ASPInsider Blog: http://codeclimber.net.nz RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/codeclimber twitter: @simonech Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic "Life is short, play hard"
