>Am Freitag, 29. November 2013 schrieb Matthew Ehle:
>> > On Nov 29, 2013, at 10:31, "Rajko" <rmatov101@charter.net> wrote:
>> > Wiki search does not work too often, so it would be nice to have
>> > already configured Google search as default:
>> > http://en.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch
>
>I'm against it for "political" reasons - we recommend to use free
>software everywhere, so using google as default search would send the
>wrong signal ;-)
>

 

I can certainly understand the philosophical reason for staying away from Google.

>Nevertheless, thanks for bringing up the topic - in the meantime I
>learned a bit more about Lucene.
>
>>>> This was one of the options we looked at before going with the current
>>> solution.  IIRC, it was implemented with an extension and had a lot
>>> of issues at the time.  That was a few years ago, so it's certainly
>>> possible that using Google is now the better solution.  As has been
>>> noted, the Lucene indices have a tendency to get corrupted and
>>> require manual intervention. 
>>
>>How often does this happen? From the mails I noticed, I'd say once or
>>maybe twice a year, but not more.

 

That's correct.  As it turns out, this is actually a completely different problem.  Something

is really broken with the search daemon, and I'm still trying to figure out what is going on.

BTW: What type of breakage was it?
Is it something that we can catch (and repair) automatically?

>> Your proposed solution would certainly
>> be easier to maintain, and it will probably give just as good or
>> better results than Lucene (even when it's happy).
>
>We might need to change the Lucene config. I know that's an often
>discussed story, so let me just list some bullet points
>- search all namespaces (and, if needed, tie up Henne because I'm sure
>  he won't like this ;-))
>- use [Namespace-Boost] in lsearch-global.conf [1] [2] to boost the
>  namespaces that we currently search (main and portal IIRC)
>
>The result will be that pages from main and portal namespace will still
>be the top-rated search results, with the (currently hidden) results
>from other namespaces below.

 

That seems reasonable.  I'll let you work that out amongst yourselves, and

we'll go with whatever decision you all want.

>> I'll talk to Scott on Monday.  I agree it's time to take another look
>> at our search options.
>
>While you are on it, please also ask him to
>- update the wiki to the latest 1.19 release - 1.19.3 is quite old,
>  there were several security updates in the meantime
>- fix SimpleFeed extension (if needed, I can help - it works for me with 
>  MediaWiki 1.19, so it should also work for the openSUSE wiki ;-)
>- merge our mw_upgrade_1.19 git branch into master (which still has
>  1.17) so that our production code isn't hidden in a branch anymore

I forwarded this to him.  I can tell you that he is working on upgrading to 1.20

right now, so this is on the radar.

 

Thank you,

Matt