Xapian discuss - Mar 2015 - debian packages with php bindings

Hi, Olly,

I use xapian for years for a small e-commerce website and I'm very happy
with it. Many thanks to you for this unvaluable piece of software.

But nothing's perfect, I keep having regrets about for a couple of things

- I can't get recent debian compiled packages, the latest I can find for
squeeze is v1.2.12 and there's no php binding with ti so I must spend time
(and take a risk of mistakes) compiling them msyelf
I think it's a issue because xapian is a very well performing engine,
let's
say the best open-sourced engine without java requirement, It's a real
value,  and lack of debian availbility really deserves it. Considering
mainstream binaries and bindings would make it a killer choice.

- I never managed to work with multiple-valued properties correctly
Considering a blue/geen product, I want its entry to match both colors.
How to find ti with both colors, and have the color matcher count it for
each color ?
To be able to cope with multple values, I'm currently running a special
layer on sofware reliing on mongodb and it make my search architecture a
bit messy and unnecessarily complex.
I think I'm a doing +1 on http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/198


Best regards

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 12:03:25AM +0200, Pascal MASSCHELIER
wrote:
> - I can't get recent debian compiled packages, the latest I can find
for
> squeeze is v1.2.12 and there's no php binding with ti so I must spend
time
> (and take a risk of mistakes) compiling them msyelf
> I think it's a issue because xapian is a very well performing engine,
let's
> say the best open-sourced engine without java requirement, It's a real
> value,  and lack of debian availbility really deserves it. Considering
> mainstream binaries and bindings would make it a killer choice.
The problem is that we can't legally distribute binary packages of the
PHP bindings:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/FAQ/PHP%20Bindings%20Package

This is rather annoying, particularly as earlier PHP versions were
dual-licensed under the GPL.  Unless someone can persuade the PHP
developers to either dual-license as GPL, or drop the pointless naming
restriction which is the cause of the incompatibility, I can only see
it getting resolved once we get to the point where we can relicense
Xapian.

The FAQ entry there also has instructions for building your own.
> - I never managed to work with multiple-valued properties correctly
> Considering a blue/geen product, I want its entry to match both colors.
> How to find ti with both colors, and have the color matcher count it for
> each color ?
You can just put all the colours for an object together in a value slot
- e.g. "blue,green" - and then write a suitable subclass of
MatchDecider
or a PostingSource which looks if a given colour is in that list.
Similarly for facets you can handle this with a MatchSpy subclass which
splits the list and processes each entry as a separate facet value.
> To be able to cope with multple values, I'm currently running a special
> layer on sofware reliing on mongodb and it make my search architecture a
> bit messy and unnecessarily complex.
> I think I'm a doing +1 on http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/198
"+1" doesn't really help - it needs somebody actually interested
in
implementing it.  It's also still not entirely clear what the details of
an implementation would be.

Cheers,
    Olly