[ANN] Beta Ruby bindings for Xapian available

Dear Ruby-talk,

I am pleased to announce that beta-quality Ruby bindings for Xapian are now available. Xapian is a powerful open source full text search engine written in C++ (http://www.xapian.org/).

The latest version of the Ruby bindings is available by anonymous SVN from https://nks-svn-001.nks.net/xapian-bindings/ . Some preliminary general usage notes are in ruby/README.txt. The bindings pass all unit tests (ruby/smoketest.rb), and there are some simple examples in the ruby/examples/ subdirectory to demonstrate their usage.

Remember, although these bindings seem to be working well so far, they have not yet been extensively tested under real-world production conditions, and so should be considered beta quality at best. There may still be some unknown nasty bugs lurking in the code. Use them at your own risk! :slight_smile:

I will be actively working on testing and further improving these bindings over the next few weeks. I welcome any suggestions, comments, testing feedback, or (especially) code patches.

Best,
Paul

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Dear Ruby-talk,

I am pleased to announce that beta-quality Ruby bindings for Xapian are
now available. Xapian is a powerful open source full text search engine
written in C++ (http://www.xapian.org/\).

Sounds cool!

[more info elided]

I will be actively working on testing and further improving these
bindings over the next few weeks. I welcome any suggestions, comments,
testing feedback, or (especially) code patches.

Have you considered setting up a project on RubyForge? Or, barring
that, setting up a mailing list, public bug tracking, etc.

···

On 4/24/06, Paul Legato <plegato@nks.net> wrote:

Best,
Paul
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thanks,
-pate
-------------------------

pat eyler wrote:

Have you considered setting up a project on RubyForge? Or, barring
that, setting up a mailing list, public bug tracking, etc.

Hmm.. Actually, I'm hoping to roll the Ruby bindings back into the main Xapian tree soon. Then, we can use the xapian-devel mailing list, and Xapian's existing bug tracking system. I will ask the Xapian maintainers how they feel about when this should happen. If they don't want to integrate it until it's production worthy (a perfectly understandable position), I will set up an interim rubyforge project.

Best,
Paul

···

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Paul Legato <plegato@nks.net> writes:

Hmm.. Actually, I'm hoping to roll the Ruby bindings back into the main
Xapian tree soon. Then, we can use the xapian-devel mailing list, and
Xapian's existing bug tracking system. I will ask the Xapian maintainers
how they feel about when this should happen.

If you're done with the initial development work, I'm happy to integrate
them. We have a list of requirements for new bindings (a version of the
"smoketest", documentation, examples but you've already met those anyway).

If you're still making major changes, it's probably better to hold off
since we like to keep the SVN version in a releasable state as much as
possible. But I gather that's no longer the case.

If they don't want to
integrate it until it's production worthy (a perfectly understandable
position), I will set up an interim rubyforge project.

The changes are sufficiently self-contained to not break the other
languages, so I think it's reasonable to integrate them but flag them
as "new" or "beta" or something like that. Shipping them with the other
bindings will hopefully get more people to try them than having a separate
download would and that's what's needed to shake out any problems.

So just let me know when you're ready.

Cheers,
    Olly (Xapian Developer)

Olly Betts wrote:

So just let me know when you're ready.

Olly,

I don't see any major changes coming. There are a few unimplemented features (like MatchDecider), but all of the core functionality is there, so we can go ahead and roll the Ruby code into the main Xapian-bindings package.

Best,
Paul

···

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OK, they're now in. If you're interested in testing, you can find
bootstrapped snapshots from SVN here:

http://www.oligarchy.co.uk/xapian/trunk/

They'll be in the next release, but it would be good to get wider
testing to shake out any problems before then.

It's best to use the Xapian mailing lists and bug-tracker for feedback:

http://www.xapian.org/lists.php
http://www.xapian.org/bugs.php

Cheers,
    Olly

···

On 2006-04-25, Paul Legato <plegato@nks.net> wrote:

[...] go ahead and roll the Ruby code into the main Xapian-bindings package.