Subject: [bug#39258] [PATCH v2 0/3] Xapian for Guix package search

From: Arun Isaac <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2020 19:47:57 +0530

> Note that Texinfo rendering doesn’t use (@ (guix ui) fill-paragraph).
> It has its own paragraph-filling code.  We cannot use ‘fill-paragraph’
> after Texinfo rendering anyway, since Texinfo knows where things can be
> filled and where they cannot—e.g., @example.

True, I did not think of this.

> We could provide a substitute for users who use only the official 'guix
> channel.  However, as soon as users combine multiple channels, they’ll
> have to build the index locally.

We could build a separate Xapian database for each channel. Xapian does
support searching across multiple databases at once and will handle
merging the results together appropriately. If I understand correctly,
this means we can provide substitutes for at least the official guix
channel and let the user build the index locally for other channels. Is
that correct?

Also, could someone please build the patchset v2 on their machine and
measure the time taken by generate-package-search-index? My laptop,
particularly my HDD is slow even as far as HDDs go. So, my figure of
20-50 seconds may not be representative.

Thanks,
Arun.