[Xapian-devel] Last minute feature for 1.0.0

[Richard Boulton]

Olly Betts wrote:
> The minimal patch itself seems safe, but I think that the approach is
> suboptimal.  I only had a quick look, but the full patch seems to be
> serialising a load of (key,tag) pairs into a blob of data which gets
> tacked on the end of the metainfo tag.  So we'll need to fetch it
> every time we open the database, whether it's wanted or not.
> 
> My point is that we have a handy Btree manager, whose entire purpose is
> to store (key,tag) pairs!  Wouldn't it be better to store this versioned
> user data using that?  Then if someone wants to store multi-KB (or
> even multi-MB) tags, it's really no problem.  And they can efficiently
> retrieve one piece of data without having to fetch all the others.  We
> should be able to slot such data into "impossible" keys in the postlist
> table I think.

[For information of anyone wanting to track this - I'm following-up in 
the bug report, where Olly's pasted his message. See
http://www.xapian.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143
]