[bt-devel] Systemwide clucene indexes

[Raphaël Pinson]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Eeli
Kaikkonen<eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Raphaël Pinson wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have a proposal to improve the usability of BibleTime for end users.
>> Currently, when you install modules, whether locally or systemwide,
>> you need to build the indexes before peforming searches. In
>> Debian/Ubuntu, quite a few modules are packaged and shipped as .deb,
>> making them available to all users. I think it would be great if the
>> indexes could be compiled and installed systemwide aswell. From what I
>> see, this would require 2 things :
>>    * that BibleTime search for clucene indexes in /usr/share/foo in
>> addition to ~ ;
>>    * that there exists a CLI tool to generate the indexes from the modules.
>>
>>
>> With these two conditions, packagers could generate the indexes from
>> the modules as they package them, and ship them together for
>> systemwide installation, which would allow all users on the system to
>> benefit from the indexes without building them.
>>
>>
>> Feedback on the idea is welcome :-)
>>
>>
>> Raphaël Pinson



Hi Eeli,


>
> Hello, it's been long time again since I last wrote to this list...
>
> The idea is basically good. It would be easier to implement like this:
>
> In the config dialog there would be a checkbox for "Preferred
> directory for indexes" and a textbox/opener button for directory
> selector. This directory would be used instead of the home directory if
> the checkbox is selected. New indexes would be created there and when
> using indexes the program would search them there first and then in the
> home directory.
>
> But that would complicate things for users. If the packagers want to
> package indexes they should modify the software so that the program uses
> the preferred directory by default. And there's a problem with file
> permissions. If the Preferred directory is selected and the user doesn't
> have write permissions, creating an index fails. At least the user
> should be given a notice: "You don't have permission to write to x/x/x.
> You can create a new index to you home directory by temporarily
> disabling the preferred index directory from the configuration dialog."


That is why I proposed to have a cascading system instead. This is
very common in Unix programs (and in KDE in particular). For example,
KDE has paths for the configuration, set in /etc/kderc. This is how
Kubuntu overrides KDE defaults without impacting user configurations.
Such a system could just look for indexes in several paths, and stop
if it finds one. If no index is found, then the user could create one
in his home directory. Is there a need to re-create an index for a
work ? If that is the case, the cascading system would just have to
override the system index with the user one (just like it's done with
configs).



Regards,


Raphaël Pinson