[Xapian-discuss] Omindex Filters

[Frank John Bruzzaniti]

I can understand peoples reservations in regards to using scripts and 
shells. So I was thinking how about if the plugins were just small 
chunks of C code (executables) that do just what the filters now do in 
omindex, but omindex would just pass a file name to the correct plugin. 
Then the plugin would do it's magic and pass the information back to 
omindex.

I'm not qualified to make suggestions as I suck at programming but I 
guess the main problem I have being a noob is when I want to use a 
feature someone else has made but then they have gone and added like 10 
features in one patch so you either have to add them all or try an work 
out what bit's you need and this is all made harder if the patch was for 
another version of omindex.  Then patch omindex and recompile it and 
re-install it.  It would be great if we could dynamically just add 
another plugin, test then be able to remove plugins without have to 
recompile omindex.


Charlie Hull wrote:
> Olly Betts wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 01:33:45PM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 09:59:16PM +0930, Frank J Bruzzaniti wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I was wondering if it would be a bad idea to have a way to incorporate 
>>>> plugins/filters in a way that would allow us to chop and change filters 
>>>> without having to recompile and edit the source.
>>>>         
>>> We've discussed this in the past, and certainly I'm in favour of
>>> it.
>>>       
>> Yes, it would be useful.
>>
>>     
>
> We'd be very much in favour of this. We'd like to use the Omindex filter 
> code for Flax, but currently it's all bound up in one file (omindex.cc) 
> and thus we'd need to maintain a separate source file, which is messy.
>
> We would also potentially be able to create some alternative filters for 
> Xapian which used the Microsoft IFilter mechanism (included with most 
> modern versions of Windows) - with these you can extract plain text from 
> Office formats, PDFs and indeed a load of other formats. They aren't 
> perfect by any means but they do generally have the advantage of being 
> written by the owners of the original file format.
>
> Cheers
>
> Charlie
>
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