[packagekit] APT backend and xapian

[Tom Parker]

(sorry, should have hit "reply to all")

On 30/10/2007, Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 11:25:19AM +0100, Tom Parker wrote:
> Please note that I might miss a bit of context here, and I don't know
> the exact extent "search implementation" may have.  If that means being
> a full backend engine to get all possible information about packages,
> then apt-xapian-index cannot do that, because it cannot store
> dependencies.  At least, I cannot think of a way to index versioned
> dependencies, or alternative dependencies, in Xapian.

xapian could store the version data on individual packages +
dependency strings. This would mean that a full dependency parser
could be implemented on top of xapian by doing a series of searches
for packages whose version strings correspond to individual
requirements of various packages. I wouldn't expect apt-xapian-index
to do everything for us, but just provide very fast searching +
information retrieval about the packages available to a system.

Initially, this would just require expanding apt-xapian-index to have
a bunch of indexer plugins to store *all* the fields for packages i.e.
make it possible to build things like axi-query.py without requiring
access to the python apt bindings at all, which would speed up things
immensely.

Tom