[htdig-dev] Nearing first complete version of HtDig 4.0

[Jeff B. <bre...@gm...>]

> I actually think we should cease providing a compiled cgi for searching.
> We should ship a polished PHP script for searching and possibly Perl &
> Python scripts as well.  There are various bindings for CLucene, so all
> of these can be made into htdig bindings by adding a bit of glue code that
> looks at the htdig.conf file etc.
>
> Why?  Nearly every system this will be installed on will have PHP, Perl or
> Python.  Any of these 3 scripts would allow much better customization of the
> output by users.  Continuing to maintain cgi code in C/C++ is not very
> attractive when these scripting languages do all the work for you.
>
> What do you think?  Any strong objections?

Totally reasonable.

By the way, Xapian Omega uses a cgi, whose configuration
language is called "omegascript". Kind of fun to use and
reminiscent of HtDig. Worth looking at for ideas.

Also, I don't know what the license situation is with Omega's cgi, but
it would be really cool if someday this user facing component
could be shared bewteen the two projects. There is precedent;
the Xapian people don't have a crawler of their own and generally
recommend HtDig's crawler.

Jeff