On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Greg Kuperberg wrote:
On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 10:44:12AM -0800, Andi Vajda wrote:
In any case, it's not that hard to build yourself, it takes a few hours
depending on the speed of your system.
I have to say that a few hours is not a very good standard for
installing software such as PyLucene. I am used installing software
in a few minutes. When I can't use yum, apt-get, or rpm, I am used to
the three-line installation procedure, "configure; make; make install".
Indeed, a configuration script is an important intermediate step that
makes it easier for other people to make RPM packages and Debian packages.
I have been using Unix for 20 years, admittedly more as a user than
as a developer, and I have never been very happy with hand-configuring
Makefiles.
Would you like to contribute a configure script ?
Moreover, in this case I depend on PyLucene for a project that I may
want to "sell" to other people. Part of the sell is going to be that
it isn't too hard for them to install.
PyLucene is an important project. It is a bridge between Python,
which is monumentally important, and Lucene, which is also important.
When PyLucene works, it works really well, because Lucene is more
complete and more scalable than many alternatives. PyLucene is also
faster than Lucene itself. That said, I think that the difficult of
installing PyLucene, and maybe also the haphazard documentation, are
the main shortcomings of the project right now. I think that you could
multiply your user base by 10 if you concentrated on documentation and
installation for a while.
Patches and contributions are welcome. The main challenge with installing
PyLucene is getting the gcj story straight. Like PyLucene, gcj is an open
source project [1] and could use help on many platforms. It is a rather
bleeding edge work in progress with very uneven platform-specific support.
As for documentation, the Java Lucene documentation [2] is the basis for the
PyLucene documentation. All exceptions are listed in PyLucene's README [3].
Again, if something in the PyLucene documentation is wrong or misleading,
contributions, corrections and patches are welcome.
The "Lucene in Action" book [4] is also a great source of documentation and
samples for using Lucene. Almost all samples from this book were ported to
python and PyLucene [5].
If OSAF has other priorities for PyLucene or for your time otherwise,
then you have every right to point that out.
PyLucene is indeed only a small part of my regular day job at OSAF. In
addition to PyLucene, I also do PyICU [6] and both these projects fill some
specific requirements for my main project, the Chandler repository [7][8][9]
where I spend the bulk of my time.
Maybe someone among the 90% of people not yet using PyLucene is going to step
forward and make some contribution improving on documentation, installation
or otherwise ?
Andi..
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/java
[2] http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/api/index.html
[3] http://svn.osafoundation.org/pylucene/trunk/README
[4] http://lucenebook.com/
[5] http://svn.osafoundation.org/pylucene/trunk/samples/LuceneInAction/
[6] http://pyicu.osafoundation.org
[7] http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/chandler/repository/
[8] http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/chandlerdb/
[9] http://blogs.osafoundation.org/chandlerdb/
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