Don,
Actually I didn't set up any straw man at all, which m-w tells me is "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted."
What I did is often more properly labeled as "stating my concerns." I didn't answer them, and I asked others with more experience and vision to answer them and clarify the situation.
I believe you may have set up a straw man when you misstated my post and my intent as asking for us to not pursue a workable solution and then flamed me a bit more for not offering any alternatives. (And then you got a bit personal and suggested I mostly just wanted folks to do things my way. I honestly don't know how that could be, since as I started off this thread by saying, I haven't yet met a search engine I like, and gosh, I'd really like to talk about that. You also suggested that OpenACS wasn't for me (and presumably I wasn't for it and maybe I should move along.) Yeah, that kind of hurt, and so I thank everyone who came along to my defense.
So just to repeat: I never said we shouldn't pursue OpenFTS, in fact I said I would probably be a user of OpenFTS. I said I was concerned with OpenFTS's maturity at this stage of the game and I said I was concerned that an OpenFTS focus now might lead to an API that was db crawler focused. What I didn't make clear was that by having "n" modules implement that API would then lead to enough inertia in the system as to preclude a web crawler based solution later. I offered the alternative that I started this thread with: a discussion on what search engine requirements are and what search engine interfaces should look like. And then I explicitly asked where my assumptions and concerns were misplaced.
I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition (does anyone?) (that by the way is homage to Monty Python AND Philip K. Dick.)
Now perhaps you haven't been following the forums lately, but in fact, I have been working on SWISH<fork> and htDig integration with OpenACS 3.2.5 to solve some client problems and to learn enough to redo it in the OpenACS 4 framework. I apologize if my timeline wasn't your timeline, but the fact is, I have been trying to run with it.
It appears your response is: because of the content repository's central role, you don't believe that a solution developed first for OpenFTS and Intermedia will preclude other technologies; that your personal experience with OpenFTS to date suggests to you that it is stable and capable of the job; and that the OpenACS 4 release is near enough that you believe now isn't the time to reopen this issue.
Is that reasonably accurate? Anyway, if so, that's a justifiable response for the project lead to make, I hope you're right, and I'm behind you. But you sure pissed all over this thread, and I for one, don't feel particularly welcome here or at all eager to figure out just what I might have to do in the future just to get you to state that I have contributed to the project.
