[KinoSearch] Release strategies (was "fields and swish3")

[Dermot]

2010/1/13 Marvin Humphrey <marvin at rectangular.com>:
> cc to lucy-dev...
>

> There are some people who are using stable branch KS and who would be
> disrupted if we simply clobber the stable branch by releasing the dev branch
> on top of it, e.g. the MojoMojo folks
> (<http://mojomojo.org/features#Searching>).  I'm reluctant to do that, since
> we haven't reached our goals for file format and API stability.  Yeah, they
> were warned by the "alpha" label, but KS has also been promising a level of
> stability which we have yet to deliver.  A one-time painful switch might have
> been OK, but forcing them back into an ongoing dev cycle isn't.
>
> To avoid disrupting such users, we could take one of two paths:
>
>  * Fork the current stable release under "KinoSearch0" and expect existing
>    users to switch.
>  * Move the dev branch (svn trunk) under "KinoSearch2" and release it as an
>    alpha.  (I lean towards this option because it sets a precedent for how I
>    think we'll need to handle versioning in Lucy.)
>
> If we'd managed to launch Lucy by now, this question would be academic,
> because Lucy would have become the successor to the KS dev branch.  And I've
> kind of been working on Lucy with that in mind.
>
> Lucy remains my main goal.  From a marketing perspective, I'm not sure that
> it's ideal to launch "KinoSearch2" as an alpha, then deprecate it in favor of
> Lucy a few months later.  And once Lucy is launched in earnest and people
> outside our small circle start contributing, KS will have to be deprecated
> because licensing issues will eventually prevent us from backporting some
> important chunk of Lucy code to KS.


Sorry for my ignorance but can I ask for a bit of background on this please?

Are you saying that you want to get Lucy up-to-date with Lucene? I
curious because that would suggest that the index formats would
eventually be cross-compatible? Won't that have a negative impact on
KinoSearch usage because there is already a Lucene module on CPAN that
uses Lucy (I know it's out-of-date) but someone is bound to create
those bindings again. This last statement isn't meant to dissuade you
by the way.

I'm also curious about what this that will mean for my current
project. I took the 0.03_072 release and I'm a bit nervous about
continued support for KinoSearch.

Regards,
Dp.