[sword-devel] Early Church Fathers

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Martin Gruner <mg.pub@gmx.net> wrote:

> Trevor, I do not want to offend you. It's not your fault that you have
> been ill. But I hope you understand that I would like to see a new
> search engine soon.

I'm not offended at all. I'd love to see a new search module but at the
moment I can't work on it anywhere near enough of the time. A situation
that will continue for several months yet.

> > > FYI, there's excellent open-source full-text search engine code
> > > available.  In its older incarnation it's called "mg" and it is
> > > associated with the book "Managing Gigabytes ...".  Text only.
> >
> > I know about mg; checking back throughthe lists archives will show several
> > of us have mentioned the software and the (excellent) book before.
> > However, it has as serious a problem as does the present "position
> > pointer" situation. It does't allow enough of a fine grain in the
> > sub-structure of the text.
>
> Well. What is better - to use a search library which is already
> available but not perfect (but surely faster than what we have now) or
> to wait for a completely new search engine which might never come?

As currently both mg and sword have the same limitations (regarding
positional information) it would be sensible to adopt mg as the search
engine within sword. When, if?, sword moves to a more flexible positional
format then would be the time to reconsider the issue.

However, mg isn't available for all platforms. Early releases suffered
Sun-endian issues. It might not be to other people taste. Perhaps a
wrapper layer is needed. Then those working on or with other search
modules (*) can interface them to sowrd instead of mg.

(*) As it happens I have one but it's proprietary and commerical. I'd like
to be able to exploit that myself as it has a general position pointer
scheme (field, paragraph, sentence, word within sentence, character within
word). Sadly I can't release it; I don't own the rights to it.

Regards, Trevor

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<>< Re: deemed!