Subject: Re: Xapian cache/search proof of concept

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2025 22:01:37 +0200

Hello,

Noé Lopez <[email-masked]> writes:

> Search is less than a second (loading guile modules, actual search is
> instantaneous) and building the cache takes ~20 seconds.
>
> The whole thing was very easy to make following the guile-xapian
> example, and it shows as it is only 71 loc.

I forgot the outcome of discussions with Simon back when they worked on
it, but now I wonder: would it be reasonable to have it in ‘guix search’
proper, with indexing happening on first ‘guix search’ for a given
channel set?

I suppose 20s is on an SSD with a warm cache; would be nice to check on
spinning disks (on an SSD current ‘guix search’ is fast enough IMO).

One thing is that I’m not confident about the use of SWIG in
Guile-Xapian (I used SWIG back when it was fashionable and it didn’t do
a great job), I’d rather not have Guix depend on it.

Ludo’.