On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Ryan McKinley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Some may be following the thread on spatial development... here is a > quick summary, and a poll to help decide what may be the best next > move. > > I'm hoping to introduce a high level spatial API that can be used for > a variety of indexing strategies and computational needs. For simple > point in BBox and point in WGS84 radius, this does not require any > external libraries. To support more complex queries -- point in > polygon, complex geometry intersections, etc -- we need an LGPL > library JTS. The LGPL dependency is only needed to compile/test, > there is no runtime requirement for JTS. To enable the more > complicated options you would need to add JTS to the classpath and > perhaps set a environment variable. This is essentially what we are > now doing with the (soon to be removed) bdb contrib. > > I am trying to figure out the best home for this code and development > to live. I think it is essential for the JTS support to be part of > the core build/test -- splitting it into a separate module that is > tested elsewhere is not an option. This raises the basic question of > if people are willing to have the LGPL build dependency as part of the > main lucene build. I think it is, but am sympathetic to the idea that > it might not be. > I'm sorta confused about this (i'll probably offend someone here, but so be it) We have a contrib module for spatial that is experimental, people want to deprecate, and say has problems. Why must the super-expert-polygon stuff sit with the basic capability that probably most users want: the ability to do basic searches (probably in combination with text too) in their app? Its hard for me to tell, i hope the reason isn't "elegance", but why aren't we working on making a simple,supported,80-20 case in lucene that non-spatial-gurus (and users) understand and can maintain... then it would seem ideal for the complex stuff to be outside of this project with any dependencies it wants? Users are probably really confused about the spatial situation: is it because we are floundering around this expert stuff????
