We already have a way to handle information that may be in either the file system or the database.
It's called the Content Repository and the reason I keep hammering home the point that all content should be stuffed there is precisely so any indexing facility will have only have to talk to the ACS in one
place.
Thus the supposed conflict you mention no longer exists. Making it disappear is the *point* of rewriting the CR to allow content to optionally be stored in the filesystem.
It may be that the CR API isn't quite up to the task of handling content stored in arbitrary locations within a server's file system, but if that's true we'll just need to modify the CR API to make it so.
Seamlessly dealing with remote content is more difficult, but I'll personally be very, very happy to see the lesser problem of providing decent search functionality for PG-based OpenACS sites solved before I worry too much about this additional issue.
And of course we'll need to keep the CR as lightweight as possible when you're not dealing with content in the db. Since any scheme to track filesystem content will want to be hooked into ACS permissions, which implies that at some level the scheme will be built on top of ACS Objects, the reality is that the CR is about as lightweight as any
such scheme will be.
Unless we decide we want a parallel and separate package to deal exclusively with indexing issues, which I'll lobby long and hard against.
If someone wants to sit down and write alternative indexers that operate on the CR, that could be substituted for InterMedia or the OpenFTS solution, sure, they can go for it.
At the moment, though, I consider this to be more distraction than useful. I don't look at the search problem as being a critical path item for the current incarnation of the OpenACS 4.x project. We have an Oracle solution and we have what appears to be a very workable Postgres solution. Yes, we hope to support other RDBMS systems in the future and I'd love to see additional search/indexing options available in the future, too.
But ... there's a bunch of "right now" issues that are more important,
IMO. If you have time on your hands, Jerry, why not pick up one of the unclaimed OpenACS 4.x packages and port it?
