Lucene 1.4.x or Lucene from SVN trunk?

[Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>]

(Note: I'm ccing ruby-dev@lucene.apache.org since the Ruby people are 
probably going to have to think about these same issues, so getting 
their opinion seems to make sense.)

The current version of Lucene4c in Subversion is based off of the 
release version of Lucene 1.4.3.  There was some previous work put into 
working with the current development version of Subversion, but it ran 
into some trouble.  It's likely that the problem was related to building 
the Java code with a 1.5.x JDK, which doesn't play nicely with GCJ.

At some point, we're going to have to transition to a newer version of 
Lucene, the question is simply when.

Things to keep in mind:

1) Newer versions of Lucene add new features, which might be useful.

2) Newer versions of Lucene deprecate interfaces, some of which we are 
actually using (the Field interface is the big one here), so getting the 
change over with soon would mean we wouldn't end up with people 
depending on interfaces that will eventually go away.

3) It's unclear when newer versions of Lucene will be actually released, 
so if we switch now it's unclear when we'll have a non-moving target to 
work with.

Personally, I think it isn't that big a problem to stick with 1.4.x for 
now, since we have an extremely limited number of users anyway.  But 
before we actually release anything we should probably at least make an 
effort to make the transition, to avoid having people depend on 
interfaces that are deprecated.

Does anyone have any other opinions on this topic?

-garrett

Re: Lucene 1.4.x or Lucene from SVN trunk?

[Erik Hatcher <er...@ehatchersolutions.com>]

On Jun 5, 2005, at 2:41 PM, Garrett Rooney wrote:
> 3) It's unclear when newer versions of Lucene will be actually  
> released, so if we switch now it's unclear when we'll have a non- 
> moving target to work with.

I don't know for sure when we'll release Lucene 1.9/2.0 either, but  
it'll be sooner rather than later.  My hunch is by August.  Given  
we've made lots of changes since 1.4.3, we'll release a beta or two  
in order to iron out any glaring issues.

> Personally, I think it isn't that big a problem to stick with 1.4.x  
> for now, since we have an extremely limited number of users  
> anyway.  But before we actually release anything we should probably  
> at least make an effort to make the transition, to avoid having  
> people depend on interfaces that are deprecated.
>
> Does anyone have any other opinions on this topic?

My vote would be to keep with the trunk (and use only non-deprecated  
API) so that Lucene4c is going to match Lucene 2.0.

     Erik

Re: Lucene 1.4.x or Lucene from SVN trunk?

[Erik Hatcher <er...@ehatchersolutions.com>]

On Jun 5, 2005, at 2:41 PM, Garrett Rooney wrote:
> 3) It's unclear when newer versions of Lucene will be actually  
> released, so if we switch now it's unclear when we'll have a non- 
> moving target to work with.

I don't know for sure when we'll release Lucene 1.9/2.0 either, but  
it'll be sooner rather than later.  My hunch is by August.  Given  
we've made lots of changes since 1.4.3, we'll release a beta or two  
in order to iron out any glaring issues.

> Personally, I think it isn't that big a problem to stick with 1.4.x  
> for now, since we have an extremely limited number of users  
> anyway.  But before we actually release anything we should probably  
> at least make an effort to make the transition, to avoid having  
> people depend on interfaces that are deprecated.
>
> Does anyone have any other opinions on this topic?

My vote would be to keep with the trunk (and use only non-deprecated  
API) so that Lucene4c is going to match Lucene 2.0.

     Erik