[Ferret-talk] Windows progress

David Balmain
Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:18:47 -0000

On 6/1/06, Alex Young <alex at blackkettle.org>
wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> What''s the current status of the Windows port?  I may be in a
position
> to lend a hand over the next couple of weeks - where should I start
> looking?

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your interest. I got Ferret to compile with Visual Studio
Express 2005. Unfortunately you currently need to use Visual C 6 to
create Ruby bindings. This proved a lot more difficult so I decided to
take a different route. Marvin Humphrey (author of KinoSearch, a perl
port of lucene) and I are about to start a new project at Apache
called Lucy (http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-lucene/LucyProposal) which
will aim to create a C port of Lucene that can be used as a backend in
all dynamic languages. This time around, portability will be a much
higher priority.

Lucy may or may not one day become the back end to Ferret. At the same
time I''m experimenting with some different options using the Ferret
codebase. Now that Lucy is happening I''m not going to worry about
Lucene index compatibility (which was currently still a long way off
in Ferret due to Java''s modified UTF-8 encoding). This experimental
code is in;

    svn://www.davebalmain.com/exp

This code is much more portable and will compile with VC6. So if you
want a Windows port quickly you can try merging this code back into
Ferret propper. Or if you are really interested in the libraries
internals you could join me working on this experimental code or join
Marvin and I on the Lucy project (still waiting on Apache approval).
Whichever route you chose your help will be most appreciated. Let me
know your thoughts.

Cheers,
Dave

> And what''s the best way to get SVN HEAD?  This happens:
> $ svn checkout svn://www.davebalmain.com/ferret/trunk ferret
> svn: Can''t connect to host
''www.davebalmain.com'': Connection refused

Sorry about that. Subversion is up and running again.