[Xapian-discuss] Installing Omega on Ubuntu

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 06:30:08PM -0500, Peter Masiar wrote:
> I am trying to install Omega on fresh ubuntu-breezy.

On x86-64 or powerpc I take it?

Incidentally, I'm hoping we can get the debian packages made official in
the next few months, which would mean they'd automatically be in the
ubuntu release after the next one.

In the meantime, I should provide x86-64 packages for breezy since
that's what I run on my main development box.  Richard: is there a magic
script which will build everything under pbuilder for me?

> I followed steps at http://www.xapian.org/download.php
> 
> up to:
>    fakeroot apt-get source -b xapian-bindings xapian-omega
> 
> What should I do next?
> (1) Do I need to continue steps in INSTALL, or apt-get did it for me?

INSTALL covers installing from the source tarballs.

It looks like the apt-get recipe isn't quite complete, since it doesn't
actually install omega or the bindings.  I *think* you want to run:

dpkg -i xapian-omega*.deb xapian-bindings*.deb

Although you probably just want to list some of the package files
matching "xapian-bindings*.deb".

> (2) Do I need to enable apache webserver, or some other webserver?

Any webserver which supports CGI should do.  Apache is known to work so
it's a good choice if you've no preference.

> (3) How I can test (from command line, maybe?) that Omega was built OK?
> I assume I can config Omega to index some existing textfiles, like Omega 
> source code, and if all is OK, you can tell me what should happen, right?

Did you read /usr/share/doc/xapian-omega/quickstart.txt ?

> (4) Looks like your CGI application to query xapian index and present 
> results is in C, right?

C++ in fact.

> Do you have something like Omega, but in python (preferably) or perl?

Nothing CGI based or anywhere near as sophisticated as Omega, but there
are some simple command line examples in the python bindings and in
Search::Xapian.

> (5) Do you have some FAQ? If you do, I did not found it.

There isn't yet - I've thought about writing one, but we don't really
seem to have any questions which get asked frequently (not even "where's
the FAQ?")!

> Even better, you may want to start a wiki where documentation can be 
> build by community efforts.

http://wiki.xapian.org/

There's not a huge amount there yet - most of the content is evolving
documentation for the evolving flint backend.  Feel free to Xapian
related add content.

My intention is to put up a copy of the documentation for people to
scribble improvements on, which we can then fold back in.  But I need
to find a way to sort out the HTML documentation vs the wiki markup
which allows for easy merging.

> Some trivial suggestions (obvious for gurus, maybe less obvious for 
> Linux newbies like me):
> 
> - I needed to install fakeroot for ubuntu
> - "su -" does not work on ubuntu - I used "su - <myusername>"

Ubuntu doesn't enable direct root logins, so you should "sudo" instead,
so amended instructions for Ubuntu would be:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get fakeroot build-dep xapian-core
$ fakeroot apt-get source -b xapian-core
$ sudo dpkg -i libxapian* xapian-doc* xapian-tools*
$ sudo apt-get build-dep xapian-bindings xapian-omega
$ fakeroot apt-get source -b xapian-bindings xapian-omega
$ dpkg -i xapian-omega*.deb xapian-bindings*.deb

By default "sudo" will remember if you typed a password in the past 15 minutes
so you should only need to authenticate once.

I'll update download.php.

> - I believe that Omega can became ubuntu package even if not part of
> Debian.

It can, though it would be useful to get it into debian too of course.

> Strange packages were installed:
> when I do:
> apt-get build-dep xapian-bindings xapian-omega
> NEW packages:
> python2.2 python2.3 python 2.4
> Question: Is it correct? Why all 3 versions? Will it break something?

The packaging is set up to build packages for all three python versions,
which is good for building packages for making available for download,
but isn't so useful if you're just building packages for yourself.

It shouldn't break anything - if the python packages couldn't coexist
then apt wouldn't let you install them together.

You can uninstall the python packages you don't want after building the
xapian packages.

Cheers,
    Olly