[Xapian-devel] A beginner in "Posting list encoding improvements"

[Hurricane Tong]

Greeting everyone,

I'm an undergraduate Computer Science student from Fudan university, China. These days I'm searching for some projects for the Google Summer of Code 2014, and I discovered Xapian. Among so many projects displayed in http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoCProjectIdeas#Project:Postinglistencodingimprovements, I'm very interested in Posting list encoding improvements. When I studied Data Structure course and Discrete Maths course,  the Huffman Coding made me interested in encoding and decoding, but for many reasons, I don't have an opportunity to learn more about encoding. As soon as I found the project, I regarded it as a good chance for me to learn encoding knowledge.


According to the guideline for beginners in Xapian, I started to build Xapian in my computer. I used to work in Windows, with MS Visual Studio 2012. But I was faced with many problems when building. Some source code doesn't support Chinese well, such as xapian-core-1.2.8\win32\xapdep\xapdep.c. I need to modify some code to fit Chinese environment. And some code seem not to fit new C++ features in VS2012 well. If there is someone who also uses Xapian in Windows, I think it will be helpful for us to talk about some issues in building in Windows together. Finally, I succeed in running some demo code in Release mode, but I still failed in Debug mode.


I have finished reading the paper provided, about VSEncoding. And plan to read some source code concerning about this project. Then I will try to put up some my own proposal. And I will appreciate it much if you can give me some extra advice for beginning with the project "posting list encoding improvements".  I'm looking forward to participating in this project.


Thanks for your reading.
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