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

[Richard Boulton]

(Moving this thread to just Xapian-devel - it's not really general 
discussion about xapian, and I don't think cross posting it further is 
particularly useful.)

Reini Urban wrote:
> Ticket? Uh my fault. I never though about that. Sounds useful :)
> http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/285
> Should probably be splitted into multiple tickets, patches.

That would be helpful, yes.

> 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).

> 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.

> Another advantage of such a config setting would be to hardcode the
> actual helper location and don't search the whole PATH at runtime for it.

A cache would also solve that.

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.

-- 
Richard