[Xapian-devel] Last minute feature for 1.0.0

[Richard Boulton]

Olly Betts wrote:
> I understand your motivation for wanting this in 1.0.0, but I'm afraid
> the time really has passed for crowbarring random new features into the
> release.  I've already said "not until after 1.0.0" to patches submitted
> weeks or months ago!

Fair enough - I just thought I'd ask, since the feature requires an 
incompatible database change.

> We were hoping to release 1.0.0 in April, and it's already May 4th!

Indeed.

> In fact, after a quick look at the previous change in this direction
> (rev 8426) I'm a little dubious about including even that in the
> release.  It's mostly a step in the right direction, but it doesn't
> appear to fix any actual bugs, and for a WritableDatabase, you're now
> carefully setting the total_length and lastdocid members of the
> database_ro member when the database is opened, but AFAICS they'll never
> get updated.  I hope they never get used, but if they do that's a new
> bug!

I don't _think_ there's a bug here, but I understand your worries.  I 
think I'll pull the patch back out and merge it with the patch in bug 
#143 for later application.

> Also, we now always retrieve and parse the metainfo record, even if we
> never use the information - if you're using a weighting scheme which
> ignores document length, I think that means that the first search on a
> cold database will now be slower.  At least that's not the default
> for BM25Weight.

On the other hand, we only retrieve and parse the information once now, 
rather than every time we calculate the average document length.  I'll 
work something better out when I come back to this after 1.0.0.

> And all this has distacted me from working on TermGenerator for 30
> minutes or so.  And that's delayed the release of 1.0.0!

Apologies.  I'll get back to working on existing blockers for #118.

-- 
Richard