Making beagle optional

[Alexander Larsson]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 11:21 +0200, Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2007-05-14, 23:33 GMT, David Nielsen wrote:
> > I think it might be good if someone started helping Alex with 
> > beagle maintainership so we could ensure quick pushes of new 
> > updates as bugs are fixed.
> 
> I am not sure, whether Alex had it on his mind, but I am afraid, 
> one of the reasons why there is insufficient support for beagle 
> is that the idea of Mono doesn't look that great lately. I think 
> that advantage of other search engines (tracker, strigi, 
> something based on JLucene) is that they don't require Mono.

This isn't really the main reason. Any indexer is bound to run in to the
same issues, since it will try to read and parse a *lot* of data. Since
so much data is read its very common to stumble upon some data that
causes a bug in the indexer. You have to be extremely carefull when
working on indexing code so that you handle all weird cases right.

In fact, its likely that being in mono (or any "managed" runtime) is an
advantage for that particular reason, since its harder to crash or leak
in such systems.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an all-American playboy rock star with no name. She's a sarcastic 
red-headed wrestler from the wrong side of the tracks. They fight crime!