[Xapian-devel] [Xapian-discuss] Dealing with image PDF's

[James Aylett]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:54:07PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:

> > I solved the preconfigured binary package problem with packaging
> > dependencies.
> 
> But that requires all the potential helper packages to be installed 
> whenever omega is.  That would be fairly annoying for a user who, say, 
> just wanted to index some HTML pages.  It also doesn't help if a helper 
> program isn't available as a package (which could certainly be the case 
> for a new helper program, but I don't know if we're using any such 
> helpers currently).

It also doesn't help when we allow simple helpers to be added on the
command line or similar, since these may be ad hoc scripts rather than
packaged whatevers. Although using the same failure mode as we have
now would be fine.

> > I cache would be overkill.
> 
> A simple (in-memory) cache of helper program paths is hardly 
> heavyweight.  But, in any case, I'm not convinced that such a cache is 
> needed - I don't expect the time taken to look through $PATH for files 
> to be a bit part of the indexing time.

The OS has a cache for this.

> I'm definitely opposed to hardcoding the location of files, incidentally 
> - there are all sorts of reasons that a user might want to use an 
> alternative helper file, and allowing them to simply place such a file 
> somewhere early on PATH is a good way to do this.

We just want the expected execvp() behaviour, don't we?

We could also use something similar to mailcap + mime.types, on
systems that support them.

J

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