[Koha-devel] searching for phrases

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

2010/3/1 Jesse <pianohacker at gmail.com>:
> Besides, this could be a long-awaiting chance to finally get rid of Zebra.
> The obfuscated code and quirky architecture make adding features and
> troubleshooting problems incredibly difficult, among other problems. If Solr
> is genuinely better, why keep Zebra?

To avoid *requiring* the full Tomcat & Java stack with every Koha
installation, along with its obfuscated code and quirky configuration
system. :)  This isn't meant as a serious knock against Solr.  I'm
just pointing out that there would be tradeoffs if we were to just
abandon Zebra, including losing a slim, fast search engine capable of
indexing arbitrary XML that speaks Z39.50 and SRU/W natively with
fewer moving parts than Solr.

In a perfect world, I agree that it would be best to settle on one
search engine and eliminate an installation option, but I don't think
that we'll ever get there; there will always be another external
engine that is newer/faster/shinier/better-supported than whatever
Koha uses at the time.  It's also important to identify the source of
the problem - in the case of phrase searching, Zebra is perfectly
capable of doing it, but there are a number of flaws in C4::Search's
notion of query parsing that stand in the way and that would still
apply if we ripped out Zebra and replaced it with Solr.

Refactoring C4::Search in 3.4 will get us most of the way, and doing
so with the idea of supporting Solr would keep us honest as we
redesign the API.  However, I would be quite content if the end result
for 3.4 was simply a cleaner front end to Zebra.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
gmcharlt at gmail.com