Re: is lucy dead?

Marvin,
Thanks for the info -- appreciate it

I'm still unclear on something, you speak of lucy like there
is something there 

The only things in the svn repository are charmonizer/ perl/
and ruby/ directories.

perl/lib/lucy seems to have the same structure as
/trunk/c_src, but again the directories are empty.

perl/lib/Lucy.pm is empty, with some inline perldoc.

If I wanted to get started there doesn't seem to be any C at
all?

Or am I missing something, and being dense? Or is it just
that the C that was going to be mered into lucy is still in
both KS and Ferret, and nothing ever got merged into lucy.

I think lucy is a great idea, I have some pet projects it
would be really useful for. Just poking around to see what I
can see.

Thanks.

-Yousef



----- Original Message -----
From: "Marvin Humphrey" <marvinrectangular.com>
To: lucy-devlucene.apache.org
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2007 7:31:08 PM (GMT-0800)
America/Los_Angeles
Subject: Re: is lucy dead?


On Oct 12, 2007, at 3:30 PM, Yousef Ourabi wrote:

> There is nothing to compile.
>
> /trunk/c_src is empty.
>
> Are there any status updates?

Lucy is dormant but not dead.  There are three committers:
myself,  
Dave Balmain, and Doug Cutting.  Doug's role was to be
advisory,  
while Dave and I were to do the heavy lifting. 
Unfortunately, Dave  
has had a number of things come up which have significantly
curtailed  
his ability to contribute to open source projects, including
both  
Ferret and Lucy.  That leaves me.

I'm still active and working on a very closely related
project,  
KinoSearch.  Basically everything that went into Lucy has
been  
integrated into the KinoSearch code base, and subsequently 

improved... I just haven't fed anything back into the Lucy
repository  
in a while.

The problem is that Lucy doesn't have users, so people don't
try it  
out, find an itch that needs scratchin', and contribute. 
KinoSearch,  
on the other hand, has received lots of nice contributions
in the  
last year.  With Dave mostly unavailable, I've gone where
the  
developers are.  Ultimately, some of the development work
happening  
on KS is likely to find its way into Lucy, and like most
people, I'm  
more productive in a social setting than working solo, so
I'm more  
productive this way.  My plan is to finish the long-awaited 

KinoSearch 0.20 update, then reassess.  I'll either keep
going with  
KinoSearch or Lucy, but not both.

For the last several months I was engaged in a
full-time-plus  
contract job, but now I am considerably freer.  I'm
presently able to  
dedicate lots of time to KS, and that will continue for
several  
months at least.

Cheers,

Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.co
m/

On Oct 12, 2007, at 10:36 PM, Yousef Ourabi wrote:

> If I wanted to get started there doesn't seem to be any
C at all?

You can see some of the work that was done by navigating to 

$TRUNK_ROOT/perl and invoking "perl Build.PL; ./Build
test".  The two  
main things Dave and I designed were Charmonizer (sort of
like  
Autoconf but C only) and Boilerplater (code generator,
implements  
vtable-based OO with reference counting).  Charmonizer is in
the Lucy  
repository, and has been incrementally improved but not
fundamentally  
changed since I started using it with KS.  Boilerplater has
never  
been committed to the Lucy repository.

Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.co
m/