Weighting Schemes: Implementing Piv+ Normalization

[James Aylett]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 12:35:57AM +0530, Vivek Pal wrote:

> > I can't tell for sure without seeing the diff. You may mean just
> > `ptr++`? But it could be something else, depending on what you're
> > trying to do.
> 
> I'm trying to unserialise normalization strings (e.g. "nfn", "nbsl"  etc.)
> along with the new double parameters (s and delta) but
> it isn't turning out to be smooth because there's no method for
> unserialising strings in serialise-double.h

Serialising it about round-tripping numbers through strings. You
shouldn't need to serialise a string; you don't even have to worry
about encoding with those strings, since they're all covered by ASCII
anyway.

> Although, doing just
> 
> const string normals = ptr++; or, const string normals = static_cast<const
> string>ptr++; fixes compile errors.

`ptr` is, if I inferred correctly, a `const char *`. (I'm not sure,
because I don't know why you're incrementing it. Please push your code
to github if you need further help so people can see the entire
context of your changes.)

const string normals = "something";

will work because there's a suitable constructor. `static_cast<>`
isn't appropriate here (again, providing I've inferred the type of
`ptr` correctly).

> But tfidfweight3 test case is failing with remote backends :-
> 
> $ ./runtest gdb ./apitest -v tfidfweight3
> 
> Running test: tfidfweight3... SerialisationError: REMOTE:Bad encoded
> double: short mantissa (context: remote:prog(../bin/xapian-progsrv -t300000
> .glass/db=apitest_simpledata)

You're deserialising something that wasn't serialised, or wasn't
serialised properly.

If I put 'xapian bad encoded double short mantissa' into Google, I get
this page as the top result (it may be further down the page for you):

https://xapian.org/docs/sourcedoc/html/serialise-double_8cc_source.html

The error message is at line 173 of unserialise_double. I don't need
to read the code to understand what the error is telling me, because
mantissa is a common term when dealing with floating point numbers
(again, Google is directly fairly helpful here).

> I'm wondering if I need to introduce a new method in serialise-double.h for
> string parameters (normalizations in this case)? To be honest, I have
> little idea about that part of Xapian so probably a workaround might be
> better. :)

Again: no. And generally, applying a workaround because you don't
understand something isn't a good idea, because how will you know if
the workaround isn't working around some important issues you need to
address directly?

J

-- 
  James Aylett, occasional trouble-maker
  xapian.org