[Lxr-dev] Swish-E

[Arne G. G. <ar...@li...>]

Since someone suggested Swish-E as a replacement for Glimpse, I had a
look at this today.  I'm extremely impressed.  While Swish-E doesn't
report line numbers or text excerpts with its results, it is extremely
fast at indexing (and searching).  I ran 2.4.15pre6 through it in just
over 2 minutes.  Hooking it into genxref added 20% or somewhat to
that, but then you get the LXR backend-abstraction in between there.
(So it should work with the CVS backend, but I didn't test that.)

I've hooked Swish-E (version 2.1-dev-24) into "genxref" and "search"
with relatively little work.  The implementation uses the old "one
freetext index database per version"-scheme, but could, with
relatively little work, have used the "one revision indexed only once
regardless of the amount of versions it belongs to"-scheme.  I'm not
sure if it would be much of a win, but it might be worth looking into
sometime.  I've kept the glimpse bits in "search" (which was a
horrible piece of code, it wasn't even under use strict) in case
someone wants to rehook Glimpse into LXR.  Glimpse has some
advantages, as noted above, so I suppose it is conceivable.

Patch follows.  Note though, that the way I've implemented this seems
to require Swish-E newer than the currently stable 2.0.5.  This might
or might not be a problem.  Anyway, have a look at it.


							Arne.