[Xapian-discuss] perl bindings

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:39:47AM +0000, Tim Brody wrote:
> When are the XS-based Perl bindings going to be deprecated in favour of
> the SWIG bindings?

A good question, but I'm not sure we have an answer yet.

If we can make the SWIG bindings a perfect drop-in replacement, I think
we can just deprecate the XS ones at that point, and remove them once we
are pretty confident that we've shaken out any remaining issues.

If user code needs much adjusting (worse if it can't be written to work with
both cleanly) then I think we probably should deprecate in the next release
series, and recommend the SWIG ones for new projects (and people who like
migrating their code) until then,

If we're somewhere between, I guess we need to think about the pain to
users vs the maintenance overhead.

If both are going to coexist for long, I guess we need to think about
making sure it is feasible to co-install them (so you can run something
wanting the XS ones and something wanting the SWIG ones on the same
machine).

> Please remove the dead RHEL RPMs from:
> http://xapian.org/download
> 
> I've built RPMs for RHEL5/CentOS5 (with a different signing key) here:
> http://rpm.eprints.org/xapian/5/
> RHEL4 is eol and shouldn't be used.

Hmm, RedHat say otherwise:

http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/summit/tburke_1050_rhel_roadmap.pdf

    customer issues of all severity, proactive security, limited hardware
    enablement, performance enhancements to enable long-term viability as a
    virtualized guest on RHEL5 & 6

According to that, even RHEL3 isn't EOL yet!

But if nobody wants to maintain such packages (or even fund someone to do
it), it's kind of irrelevant what the status of the OS is.

> For my own convenience I have written an RPM for the repository:
> 
> rpm -ivh
> http://rpm.eprints.org/xapian/5/noarch/rpm-eprints-org-xapian-5-1.noarch.rpm
> yum update
> yum install xapian-core

OK, I've updated the download page with this.  If the wording is wrong or
bad, please send a patch.

> Which will tie users to rpm.eprints.org but the RPM could be trivially
> rewritten to xapian.org.

I'm happy to do whatever is easier for you to maintain.

> (NB CentOS expects /5/ whereas RHEL expects /5Server/)

So do the instructions above work only for CentOS?

Cheers,
    Olly