A Greeting for Xapian community

[James Aylett]

Hi there, and welcome to Xapian :)


On the documentation build, I'm not sure what's going on. I'm on Debian stable here, and I don't have texinfo installed. ./bootstrap completes successfully for me. My understanding of makeinfo is that it's not actually needed for Xapian, and the build system shouldn't complain about its absence.

As part of the "building from git" section there's a part specifically about documentation requirements. Can you confirm that you'd run the apt-get command in there to pull in the packages needed? If that doesn't work (without texinfo and its dependencies installed) then we'd need a bit more information about Deepin — although I strongly suspect it's not removing anything from Ubuntu 16.04.

However, more broadly, I'd suggest you follow the getting started instructions from the developer guide (https://xapian-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), which doesn't try to go through the different options — it just gives you more straightforward information about getting the whole of Xapian built. HACKING is rather long, and it can be easy to miss something useful there, because it's explaining all the details. When you're getting started, you often just want to jump in and get going!


On building only some components of Xapian, this is controlled when you first set up the build tree, using the ./bootstrap script. If you run ./bootstrap --help it will say:

> ./bootstrap [--ftp] [--without-autotools|--clean] [MODULE...]
>
> The default is to bootstrap all known modules.  Any modules which have a
> file called ".nobootstrap" in their top-level will be skipped.

This is also mentioned at the top of the "Building from git" section of HACKING.

So you can either drop a .nobootstrap file (it can be empty) into xapian-applications/omega, or you can explicitly bootstrap only some modules:

$ ./bootstrap xapian-core xapian-bindings


Hope this helps!

J

> On 2 Mar 2019, at 08:58, outdream <a13700bc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear mentors and friends working on Xapian:
> 
> Sorry for bothering you here, please excuse my rudeness. In order to
> clearly represent my thoughts, I think my words going a bit verbose,
> thus it is unsuitable to put them in the chat room or it would be a
> hell for the readers.
> 
> This email consists of 3 parts, my self introduction (I'm new here)
> and two question I met while building Xapian from git. And it's
> written with markdown style and sent as pure text, to avoid the case
> that markdown is unsupported. If the big length of this email also
> leads to problem, please give me a tip, I would keep it in mind :#.
> It's very kind of you for replies to any part. :)
> 
> 
> ## Self Introduction
> 
> Hello everyone! I'm outdream (it's my favorite nickname), a college
> student from China. I get known of Xapian from GSoC this year. I'm
> interested in the ideas of "Weighting Schemes" and "Text-Extraction
> Libraries".
> 
> As for my skills, on program languages, I'm familiar with C++, Python
> and Java. Besides, I have a little experience of information retrieval
> (from a toy project about SE) and Linux system programming (from a
> naive file system based on FUSE). I hope I could be a valuable
> contributor for these projects.
> 
> As a recruit both for open source world and Xapian, I'm in the process
> of reading guide and getting familiar with code of Xapian. I hope it
> won't be too late to take part in. Below are questions I met during
> the building from git, please everyone for your comments and advice,
> both for technical questions or mistakes on my communication style.
> Glad to meet you all, hope I could be welcome here. :}
> 
> 
> ## Build tool chain omission
> 
> I'm not sure whether texinfo is an omission in building tool chain.
> Maybe it should be added to the required tools for building Xapian
> from git?
> 
> I did the building obeying steps given in the guide file "HACKING".
> Before executing the bootstrap script, I install the asked tools with
> the command:
> 
>> apt-get install build-essential m4 perl python zlib1g-dev uuid-dev wget bison tcl
> 
> But while I execute bootstrap, an error stopped the process with
> message "makeinfo is missing". I checked detailed error info and
> installed texinfo. Then bootstrap works successfully.
> 
> I suppose it may be caused by one of the two reasons: As Ubuntu and
> Debian are best supported by Xapian, maybe texinfo is installed by
> default in these systems, but not available in my environment (Deepin,
> version 15.8, a linux distribution based on Ubuntu 16.04); In another
> case, it may be an omission in the document. Without information about
> other systems, I could not make a clear judgement. I hope this would
> be helpful in making the document more perfect.
> 
> 
> ## Building contents control
> 
> Another is how to take control on building omega and the documents?
> 
> This is mainly out of my curiosity. The libs needed for the building
> of Omega and documents are singly listed in the document, so I thought
> it's an optional to build the Omega module. But when checking the
> generated Makefile in my build dir, I found all the commands
> associated with the omega application. Back reading the file HACKING,
> I still have not found a way to control contents to be built, this
> confused me.
> 
> 
> Thanks for any replies in advance, nice to meet you ;).
> 
> Best regards,
> outdream
> 

-- 
 James Aylett
 devfort.com — spacelog.org — tartarus.org/james/