Baloo/XapianProblems

Problems with Xapian

• It heavily relies on exceptions. Exceptions are not well supported in Qt and might make the application crash as mentioned here. For example while locking a database Xapian expects the program to catch certain exceptions and retry if they are caught.

• If we want to read and write to an Xapian database simultaneously we need to keep separate copies for reading and writing, thus wasting memory.

• It does not handle data that is changing frequently, if data in document changes to frequently it can lead to a conditions in which locking the database for writing becomes impossible thus making baloo fail.

• Baloo needs support for normalizing text i.e. removing all diacritic marks and also needs to split words with '_' to generate terms, Xapian's term generator doesn't provide support for either. So baloo uses its own term generator.

• While searching for something the user may not type complete words so we need to look for every possible expansion of the words in a query, xapian doesn't provide this feature so we're using our own query parser.