[Xapian-devel] Last minute feature for 1.0.0

[Richard Boulton]

I'd like to draw people's attention to bug report #143 that I've just 
submitted.  This is a proposal (and patch) to add the ability to store 
arbitrary metadata associated with a database (rather than with an 
individual document in the database).  The rationale for this feature is 
explained more fully in the bug report, but briefly I've come across 
several situations where I need to store information about how a 
database has been indexed, or which version of an external database 
corresponds to a xapian database, and it needs to be possible to ensure 
that modifications to this information are transactionally modified 
together with the Xapian database contents.

If at all possible, I'd like to get this into version 1.0.0, although I 
appreciate that it's very late in the day for such changes.  Partly, my 
desire to do this is because I want to use it now, but it's also because 
the feature requires a minor change to the flint database format, so now 
seems a good time to apply it (since people are going to have to rebuild 
their databases to use 1.0.0 anyway).

The patch only adds the feature to the flint and inmemory databases, but 
I think that adding it to remote databases wouldn't be hard at all.  I 
don't think it's worth adding it to quartz databases.

It's probably best to add further comments to the bug report at:
http://www.xapian.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143

-- 
Richard