Xapian devel - Nov 2006 - set_bias() in bindings

I'm trying to call Enquire.set_bias() from the python bindings.  This fails
as follows:
>>> db=xapian.Database('/home/richard/foo')
>>> enq=xapian.Enquire(db)
>>> enq.set_bias(1.0, 3600)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: in method 'Enquire_set_bias', argument 3 of type
'time_t'


I know that set_bias is a temporary API, but it would be good to be able to
use it as it is.  Is there some trick that can let this work that I don't
know of, or is a fix needed to the bindings?

As far as I can tell, the problem is that SWIG doesn't know about the
time_t type, and there is no definition of it in the xapian.i file (or the
files this pulls in).

I tried patching xapian-bindings/xapian.i to make things work on my system,
but no luck yet.

Any neat ideas, anyone?

-- 
Richard

Quick follow up - changing the single occurrence of "time_t" in
xapian.i to
"long" makes it work on my system - but doesn't seem like a good
idea
portability-wise.

-- 
Richard

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 04:03:51PM +0000, Richard Boulton
wrote:
> I know that set_bias is a temporary API, but it would be good to be able to
> use it as it is.  Is there some trick that can let this work that I
don't
> know of, or is a fix needed to the bindings?
It's not really much use as it is - I shouldn't have committed it in
hindsight.  Rather than fiddling with what's there now, I think time
would be better spent finishing off the ExternalPostList patch:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.devel/741

We could then tweak that to provide weight information and use it to
implement a general MatchBiasFunctor that was actually useful to people.
> As far as I can tell, the problem is that SWIG doesn't know about the
> time_t type, and there is no definition of it in the xapian.i file (or the
> files this pulls in).
I suspect this would fix it:

%apply long time_t;

But then you'll probably have to fix up the build system for C# at
least, and it really isn't worth the effort.

Cheers,
    Olly