Re: ANNOUNCE: Beagle & Libbeagle 0.3.4

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi Enrico,

> > Your data will automatically re-indexed ...
>
> this behaviour should be reconsidered, since it exposes these two
> drawbacks:

If you ran beagled 0.3.4, you can try to change the version from 18.x to 19.x 
in ~/.beagle/Indexes/*Index/version

But read below to understand the risks with it.

> 1) (I think) the indices are dropped comletely on starting the new
> beagle version, so until everything is re-indexed, I cannot find many

Right. And yes, sadly your old documents will not be found until everything is 
re-indexed.

> 2) (I think) I will loose all web pages that I ever visited, until I
> revist them, which I will not do when I can't remember them. So finding

This is an even bigger problem.

> A solution I could imagine is not to drop the index, but to schedule all
> resources to be updated, und replace the lucene documents with the new
...

First a lame disclaimer from old release emails 
"At this point in development, we cannot commit to stable APIs or file
formats.  You will almost certainly need to reindex your data at some
point in the future."

:-D Wish I could use this in a serious way.

Binary incompatibility is broken when the index format changes e.g. some new 
required internal field was added or some field structure changed. It would 
be hard to maintain backward ABI compatibility in those cases without add a 
pain, if at all possible.

Now I absolutely do not remember if the version was increased this time for 
anything like that or just to force reindexing with newer lucene. If it was 
the latter, then it could have been avoided since lucene-2.1 is backward 
compatible and I hold myself responsible. I will be careful in the future and 
with lucene-2.3.

- dBera

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------
Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE / Mandriva / Inspiron-1100