Inaccurate wiki documentation?

[Shane Perry <th...@gmail.com>]

I am in the process of setting up a core using Solr 4.3.  On the Core
Discovery<http://wiki.apache.org/solr/Core%20Discovery%20(4.3%20and%20beyond)>
wiki
page it states:

As of SOLR-4196, there's a new way of defining cores. Essentially, it is no
longer necessary to define cores in solr.xml. In fact, solr.xml is no
longer necessary at all and will be obsoleted in Solr 5.x. As of Solr 4.3
the process is as follows:


   - If a solr.xml file is found in <SOLR_HOME>, then it is expected to be
      the old-style solr.xml that defines cores etc.
      - If there is no solr.xml but there is a solr.properties file, then
      exploration-based core enumeration is assumed.
      - If neither a solr.xml nor an solr.properties file is found, a
      default solr.xml file is assumed. NOTE: as of 5.0, this will not be true
      and an error will be thrown if no solr.properties file is found.

Using the 4.3 war available for download, I attempted to set up my core
using the solr.properties file (in anticipation of moving to 5.0).  When I
start the context, logging shows that the process is falling back to the
default solr.xml file (essentially the second bullet does not occur).
 After digging through the 4_3 branch it looks like solr.properties is not
yet part of the library.  Am I missing something (I'm able to get the
context started using a solr.xml file with "<solr></solr>" as the contents)?

I'm going with a basic solr.xml for now, but any insight would be
appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Inaccurate wiki documentation?

[Shawn Heisey <so...@elyograg.org>]

On 5/20/2013 1:28 PM, Shane Perry wrote:
> Using the 4.3 war available for download, I attempted to set up my core
> using the solr.properties file (in anticipation of moving to 5.0).  When I
> start the context, logging shows that the process is falling back to the
> default solr.xml file (essentially the second bullet does not occur).
>   After digging through the 4_3 branch it looks like solr.properties is not
> yet part of the library.  Am I missing something (I'm able to get the
> context started using a solr.xml file with "<solr></solr>" as the contents)?

I think you're right about the wiki being inaccurate.  Although I 
probably have enough access to rename the wiki page from 4.3 to 4.4, I 
don't know how to do it.  I have updated the existing page with a note 
summarizing some of what's below:

The core discovery code is fundamentally broken in 4.3.  The code that 
will be released as part of Solr 4.4 (branch_4x) is VERY different. 
There will soon be a 4.3.1 release, but due to the massive code changes, 
the known bugs in core discovery will not be fixed in that release, and 
there may be bugs that we don't even know about yet.

If you want to experiment with core discovery now, I would recommend 
that you download the source code or a nightly build of branch_4x, the 
current stable release branch.  This branch is usually free of major 
showstopper bugs.  Not always of course, because it is under active 
development, but we do try.

If you want something more stable, then use the old-style solr.xml with 
4.2.1 or 4.3.x.

The 5.0 release (currently called trunk) is still a long way off.  The 
trunk and branch_4x codebases are currently similar enough that most 
patches will work on both versions without any manual work at all.  This 
means that almost every new feature gets added to both 4.x and 5.0. 
Eventually the two branches will diverge to the point where backporting 
features to 4.x will be extremely hard.  That is likely the point where 
branch_5x will be created and there will be a major effort to release 5.0.

Thanks,
Shawn