Who has argued that we should lock ourselves into a single solution?
Speaking of strawmen, the only person I hear raising that issue is Jerry.
Months ago I made it clear that I thought it would be good to have a non-db-based as well as db-based solution. My first response in this thread repeated that point. As did my last.
There's only a single solution in the works at the moment because no one offered to pick up Swish or htdig integration as a work item back when I had it listed as a possible solution in need of a champion.
That's the one and the only reason. If someone had picked that up and
if no one had volunteered to investigate the "Russian solution" then I'd undoubtably be accused of locking us into Swish or htdig.
Right?
Do I need to do anything more to knock down that strawman? Do I need to drench it in gasoline and light fire to it, as well?
As far as abstracting out an interface to indexing tools, the place to make the hook is the CR. As long as we follow that paradigm then adding additional indexing tools in the future shouldn't be a big deal. Adding them now shouldn't be, for that matter.
Yes, Jerry has worked on the xml stuff. When I said he's not been contributing I was referring to the OpenACS 4.x project - if OpenNSD were actually viable and active, the xml/soap stuff would more properly be hosted and championed there because it is in no way an OpenACS-specific/only tool. Jerry has done other good things in the AOLserver space.
I will repeat that I don't see this as anything close to a critical path item for project completion. My goal is to get a releasable product done in reasonable time. I'm convinced that OpenFTS will provide an adequate search solution. I've used it on the postgres site and it works quite well. Others report being happy with it as well.
I personally believe that those of us who are looking to complete OpenACS 4.x soon should be focusing our efforts on other things at this point in time.
Those who don't hold that goal are certainly welcome to do whatever they please, but I'm not going to let go of my focus and I'm going to resist efforts to dilute project resources in ways that work against achieving the goal I'm focused on.
