: >> More than 70% of solr these days is indexing strategy or client libraries, : >> rather than search. : >> These are important, but are now beginning to clutter things up for : >> deployment.
Just because stuff is included in a release, (even a binary release) doesn't mean people need to "deploy" it. We release code -- and as convinience we release compiled jars, generated documentation, and sample configs -- but we don't produce deployable .rpm, .deb, .dmg, or windows installer files that make assumptions about where you want things installed or how much of solr you want installed. Other people are free to package Solr up in those forms, and those people can decide to break up the official release into whatever forms they want, but trying to do that as part of our release process can be tedious to deal with, and risks frustrating users who think solr is missing features because they don't realize they only have the "lite" install and not the "full" install. FWIW: I use to think the idea of a slimmed down download was a good idea way, way, way back but Doug convinced me that it was better to have everything available out of the box so people get a good impression of all the features right way. Keeping the "core" solr application and client libraries small so people can use them in resource limited enviornments is definitely a good idea, but that's what plugins and good library abstractions are for -- it doens't really need to impact the size of the download. : >> It would be good to offer a lite version for those that are just : >> upgrading, But how do you know what they want to Upgrade? If they are using Solr 1.3 with the SolrJ and the DIH plugin then when they upgrade to Solr1.4 they need to upgrade SolrJ and DIH as well. We can't provide (useful) slimmed down tarballs for "upgrading" unless you make one for every possible permutation of plugins and client libraries people might have. : >> and a simple target : >> to build a lite-example for those hacking away on the code or distributing : >> a : >> example version. In theory that's what "ant example" is for ... but at some point it started depending on "example-contrib" for no obvious reason. (if anything it seems like it should be the other way arround) -Hoss
