On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, David Pratt wrote:
Hi Greg, Andi has been pretty much been single-handedly helping everyone on
this list with very good and timely advice. I think you are a bit off base
with your comments. Admittedly, the compile time is long - but PyLucene
itself is real software ingenuity - and it also takes what it takes to
compile. I am sure Andi would not turn down binaries from folks who have
taken time to compile on various platforms.
For various reasons, I cannot provide binary downloads built by other people
but I have no objections to adding links to them on the PyLucene homepage.
Andi..
As far as documentation, pick up a copy of 'Lucene in action' which is an
excellent resource. All the workable code from the book is included in the
PyLucene sources and there is plenty to read in the samples. If you look at
the archives of this list you will find plenty in the way of discussion on
the quirks of various builds and platforms over time - most of which Andi has
captured in the Makefile as these were reported.
This is a young project and the evolution of compilers, which are complex,
certainly adds to the mix. I would not take this as disregard for your
platform or project, but more as evolution that takes time. Your need to be
patient with gcc and gcj as they evolve - or contribute to solutions to fix
them. If you are asking for assistance, come with some appreciation of the
effort that has gone into this software and the folks behind it.
I am sure as time goes on there will eventually ports and packages on various
platforms once there is some real stability. As an example, binaries of jdk
are now being maintained as part of FreeBSD's ports collection. I would see
some opportunity to distribute safe binaries further down the road. That
said, folks will need to step up to maintain a port or package for their
distribution system when that time arrives.
Right now, we ought be thankful that builds of PyLucene on gcc-4.2 (beta) are
beginning to succeed on certain platforms (since that last time this happened
was gcc-3.4.6 for most part).
Regards,
David
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.
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.
If OSAF has other priorities for PyLucene or for your time otherwise,
then you have every right to point that out. On the other hand, Chandler
itself is supposed to be for user-friendly collaboration. It's strange
for them not to care more about cross-Unix installation.
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