[ZODB-Dev] Diff for Standalone SearchIndex

[Chris McDonough]

Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> Chris, thanks for the advice. However, there's a problem: I need this now.
> So I'll have to hack on something in the meantime, if only to be able to
> further my work. Additionally, I think the SearchIndex, as it was
> undocumented, stood pitifully underused (it even works, for heaven's sake
> :-). Apart from that, I haven't seen much work done on standalone Indexing
> anyway, and if that's a sign of the future, then anything I do now will
> probably be worth something.

Sure... I've not found SearchIndex code useful outside of the Catalog,
but it'd be pretty easy to build something useful on top of it that
isn't the Catalog.  We've just haven't had a reason to do this lately.

> It would be lovely if the whole mechanics of indexing didn't change; that
> way less would break. Additionally, it would be nice if the new indexes
> were made with the standalone DB users in mind; would prevent the
> ZCatalog/Catalog issue we have at present.

The "index interface" (to the extent that there was one) used by the new
indexes is compatible with the old indexes, AFAIK.

I don't know to what extent the new "pluggable" indexes depend on things
not distributed with StandaloneZODB.  Unforunately, making sure there
weren't any gratuitous dependencies on Zope-specific modules within the
new index code wasn't a goal in this project, so it's possible that
there are.  These are the sorts of things you'd need to find out (and
possibly sort out) with both SearchIndex and the new pluggable index
stuff.

Of course it's totally up to you.  But if I were you, I'd be worried
about needing to maintain the "old" SearchIndex code, as it will likely
rot quickly once we move to pluggable indexes.  Although I suppose that
if you created SearchIndex code that had minimal dependencies, it
wouldn't be so bad.  But the newer indexes are going to continue to
accrete features that won't be backported to the older ones, and you'll
likely want to backport these features (proximity searching, better
range searches, etc.)

Keep an eye on the zope-checkins mail list for goings on if you're
interested..

- C