[Xapian-discuss] Parallel installation of Python bindings

[James Aylett]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 12:23:43PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:

> Thomas Waldmann asked me a question on IRC, about how to cope with 
> upgrading his application (MoinMoin) to use the latest version of Xapian 
> if available, but still work with the older releases (so that, for 
> example, users can just use the version of Xapian available from their 
> linux distribution), and, in particular, if other applications require a 
> older Xapian to be installed, how to avoid conflicts.

I agree that this isn't practical to do. We're not intending to make
backwards incompatible changes often enough to really need it (I hope
:-).

Incidentally, for MoinMoin although they're reasonably careful about
getting dependencies with BC issues right, the entire thing still has
a significant upgrade headache, because each time a new version comes
out the processing and memory requirements go up, sometimes by
incredible amounts. From memory, 1.1 to 1.3 (I think - it occurs to me
that they are the version numbers of the Big SWIG Rewrite, so they
might be wrong here) took us from a usable system to something that
took minutes to load any page, on a machine that quite frankly should
have been able to cope. (Upgrades since then have been easier, but
we've been upgrading our hardware faster since then for other
reasons.)

Other projects don't even tend to worry about this sort of thing.

J

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org