Re: searching in subversion repos

["Richard Boulton" <richard lemurconsulting com>]

> A thought crossed my mind recently about having beagle search inside
> subversion repos. Would I have to implement that as a backend? I've
> only written fairly trivial filters so far so I'm not sure how much
> work that would involve or if it would be practical but it would be
> quite cool to be able to search back in time through all my code and
> documents in the repo that I use to store all my work.

I don't know the ins and outs out implementing this for beagle, but being
able to search through subversion (or CVS) repositories would be a useful
feature.  Don't forget that such repositories also contain a lot of
potentially useful information in the form of log messages attached to
each commit.

I'd encourage anyone thinking of working on this kind of search to take a
look at the "cvssearch" project (at http://cvssearch.sourceforge.net/) for
ideas, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel.  In particular, take a look
at the papers linked to from that page:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~amichail/cvssearch/paper.pdf
and
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~amichail/cvssearch/paper2.pdf

You might be able to get the cvssearch code working, but development on it
has been fairly dead lately due to lack of time.  The ideas described in
the papers are well worth reading, though.

-- 
Richard