Baloo/XapianProblems

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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 certian exceptions and retry if they are cought.
  • 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.