[Xapian-devel] Omega changes

[James Aylett]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 11:17:41AM +0000, Olly Betts wrote:

> We shouldn't just make everything harder to use just because we're
> worried that someone will ignore common sense and the documentation.
> A balance needs to be struck - you shouldn't deliberately go around
> creating traps for the unwary, but good tools sometimes need to be
> sharp...

True. But we don't want to ship a tool which doesn't let you do a safe
thing in a sane way, which I think an environment variable would count
as. (It's perhaps not as sane as separating your permissions using
userv, but that's not always possible on limited private install
space.)

I'm not necessarily arguing that omega should never load options from
the same directory as itself. If deploying it myself, I'd want the
option of not relying on that, and short of wrapping it in a shell
script that changes directory before invoking omega I can't think of a
way round it right now.
 
> > You have to get pretty devious if the only thing you can run in the
> > environment is CGI/PHP (because of execution time limits).
> 
> A find job may well be too slow, but locate most likely isn't, and an
> interactive browser isn't either.

True, but it requires genuine people effort to find stuff. Not true of
locate, of course, but that assumes that it's enabled, updated, and
accessible, which isn't always the case. (Certainly our Solaris boxes
don't have it working, for whatever reason.)

> Even find may be quick enough once lots is cached, so rerunning it a
> few times may stop it timing out.

I'd class that as pretty devious :-)

J

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org