[Xapian-discuss] migrating from Muscat 3.1

[Graham Walley]

Thanks Olly,

Graham




Graham Walley 
Team Leader - Historic & Natural Environment 
Leicestershire County Council 
Room 500 
County Hall 
Glenfield 
Leicestershire 
LE3 8TE 
tel: 0116 265 7063 
fx: 0116 265 7965 
em: gwalley at leics.gov.uk 

-----Original Message-----
From: Olly Betts [mailto:olly at survex.com] 
Sent: 22 May 2006 11:29
To: Graham Walley
Cc: xapian-discuss at lists.xapian.org
Subject: Re: [Xapian-discuss] migrating from Muscat 3.1

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 10:55:49AM +0100, Graham Walley wrote:
> As a regular user of the old Muscat for text manipulation and
exporting
> to Access databases is there a Muscatel type facility in Xapian?

Muscatel is rather tied in to the old Muscat command line API and macro
system, which is probably where Muscat and Xapian are most obviously
different, so there's no direct equivalent.

Back when Xapian was "Open Muscat" and aimed to be the next major
version of Muscat, we decided that most people didn't want to learn to
work a special purpose language so it was better to eliminate this part
of Muscat, and it was better to go for the more open solution of
providing bindings to general purpose scripting languages which many
people already know (such as Python and Perl.)

So you should be able to achieve everything you can with Muscatel in
Xapian, but not in the same way.  For arbitrary text manipulation, just
use your favourite scripting language.  For building databases using
data from arbitrary sources, either use a simple conversion script
piped into scriptindex, or use Xapian's indexing API directly.  For
exporting data from ad-hoc queries, you could use the bindings and write
a simple script, or perhaps use Omega with a suitable Omegascript
template.

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Cheers,
    Olly

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