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Message-ID: <e2111bbb0807171412k517f4bbeq8024b51b62ce0184@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:12:48 -0400
From: "Paul Davis" <paul.joseph.davis@gmail.com>
To: couchdb-user@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: the search api?
In-Reply-To: <64a10fff0807171357v152ee252v4637472bebeb74a3@mail.gmail.com>
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References: <64a10fff0807171357v152ee252v4637472bebeb74a3@mail.gmail.com>

Heya,

Yeah, the Xapian GPL stuff is kind of a PITA. Lucene would also be an
option for getting around dumb legalities.

And oh holy cow, pyndexter looks pretty interesting after reading the
first paragraph. If it doesn't suck underneath the hood it'd be a
pretty good way to allow people to use whichever engine they want.

The only thing with the FTI is that the future of how we couple
external software to couchdb is in a state of uncertainty. Between
plugins and action servers etc, I was going to wait till there was
something more steady in place before attacking this full force.

The _search url was taken out for the 0.8 release. It should still be
in the lucene branch though. Hacking it back into trunk should be a
fairly trivial patch.

Anyway, hope that helps. Feel free to shout if you have other
questions, or if I haven't managed to answer the original ones.

Paul

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Dean Landolt <dean@deanlandolt.com> wrote:
> Paul Davis' work on integrating couch and
> xapian<http://code.google.com/p/couchprojects/source/browse/trunk/query_servers/xapian/README?r=23>seems
> like a good jumping-off point. But it seems to me it would be great if
> I could do something like this with an abstraction layer between couch and
> the search software (as an added bonus the code wouldn't have to be GPL'd
> and could be distributed with couch). From what I can tell
> pyndexter<http://swapoff.org/wiki/pyndexter/docs>looks like a nice
> option -- it's got a great API and even has its own
> built-in engine (pure-python, so slow, but no additional deps). Plus
> pluggable multilingual stemming and a nice query syntax, etc...
>
> I'm going to see if I can't turn this into a generic middleware layer that
> can catch couch's updates on stdin to update the index, but I don't even
> know where to begin in connecting the query server. From what I gather,
> there's no longer a /db/_search api -- how are these calls supposed to be
> invoked? Any information would be fantastic. Couch has proved everything
> I've wanted and more -- but I'd kill for a servicable search option...
>
> Dean
>