[Xapian-discuss] Merge xapian-examples into xapian-core?

[Olly Betts]

I just noticed something insane about xapian-examples.  Here's the
contents of the tarball for 0.8.5, sorted in decreasing size order:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly       679970 Dec 23 20:01 configure
-rw-r--r--    1 olly     olly       247638 Dec 23 20:01 aclocal.m4
-rw-r--r--    1 olly     olly       183313 Sep 14 13:33 ltmain.sh
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly        41362 Jul 27  2003 config.guess
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly        34429 Dec 23 17:45 ChangeLog
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly        29973 Jul 27  2003 config.sub
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly        23369 Nov  3 20:16 getopt.cc
-rw-r--r--    1 olly     olly        22790 Dec 23 20:01 Makefile.in
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly        15131 Dec 16  1999 COPYING
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly        12123 Jul 27  2003 depcomp
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly        10270 Jul 27  2003 missing
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         6822 Dec  7 16:55 delve.cc
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         6740 Dec 23 17:39 INSTALL
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly         5569 Jul 27  2003 install-sh
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         3272 Dec  7 16:55 simpleexpand.cc
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         3196 Dec  7 16:55 quest.cc
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         2964 Nov  3 20:10 gnu_getopt.h
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         2921 Dec  7 16:55 simpleindex.cc
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         2499 Dec  7 16:55 copydatabase.cc
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         2425 Dec  7 16:55 simplesearch.cc
-rwxr-xr-x    1 olly     olly         1801 Jul 27  2003 mkinstalldirs
-rw-r--r--    1 olly     olly         1447 Dec 23 20:03 config.h.in
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         1432 Dec 23 17:45 NEWS
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly         1083 Dec 23 17:45 configure.ac
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly          773 Nov  9 03:05 Makefile.am
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly          434 Dec 23 17:45 README
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly          215 Jun 27  2002 TODO
-r--r--r--    1 olly     olly           66 Jun 27  2002 AUTHORS

All the really large files are only there because this is a separate
package.

The autoconf magic needed by xapian-examples is all in xapian-core
already, as are getopt.cc and gnu_getopt.h.

In fact of the 11 largest files, only ChangeLog isn't redundant.

I'd estimate merging xapian-examples into xapian-core would add 16K
(or 0.8%) to the size of xapian-core (that's the size of a tar.gz
containing the files I'd keep - if anything they'll compress better in a
larger tarball).  As a separate tarball xapian-examples is 302K!

Merging them would also give delve and quest a higher profile - they're
useful tools for poking Xapian databases to check what they contain.
And copydatabase has its uses too.

We're already merging xapian-core and xapian-examples in the RPMs
anyway.  Meanwhile the debian packages are currently shunning
xapian-examples.

Cheers,
    Olly