Subject: Re: Xapian cache/search proof of concept

From: Arun Isaac <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2025 21:28:09 +0100

Hi Ludo,

> 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?

We might also consider building the xapian index along with the package
cache. But, that does come with the cost of slowing down profile builds
slightly.

> 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.

I'm not a big fan of SWIG either. But, the main reason guile-xapian uses
SWIG is because that's what upstream
https://github.com/xapian/xapian/tree/master/xapian-bindings provides us
with. I'm not saying it is the best situation, but it is what it is, I
guess.

Regards,
Arun