[Xapian-discuss] perl bindings

[Tim Brody]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:22:38 -0000, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:

> 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.

I'm unsure how you can test the above without writing a unit test for  
every feature. It "works for me" but then I had to rewrite my code to use  
the network connection stuff anyway.

Otherwise, there are a couple of "FIXMEs" in regard to memory leaks in  
SWIG? What else is there to do?

>> 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.

Hmm, well there's no harm in leaving the packages online but flag them as  
unsupported/out of date. I'm about to retire my last server running RHEL4  
and it's a long time since I even tried compiling xapian on it.

>> 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.

To get source RPMs this should work (yumdownloader is provided by  
yum-utils):

$ yumdownloader --source xapian-core
$ yumdownloader --source xapian-bindings
$ yumdownloader --source xapian-omega
$ yumdownloader --source libuuid-devel

(libuuid was a new requirement in 1.2 but isn't available in RHEL5?)

>> 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.

"rpm.eprints.org" will exist for as long as I'm here (in work, not this  
planet). Bandwidth is paid for by UK taxpayers ...

>> (NB CentOS expects /5/ whereas RHEL expects /5Server/)
>
> So do the instructions above work only for CentOS?

I sym-linked so both will work. I'm just saying it's a "gotcha" for CentOS  
should you post the RPMs to xapian.org.

-- 
All the best,
Tim.