Hi all, recently I wanted to try out some modifications of Lucene's postings format (namely, copying blocks that have no deletions without int-decoding/encoding -- this is similar to what was described here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-2082). I started with changing Lucene 4.1 postings format to check what can be done there.
I came across the following problem: in Lucene41PostingsReader the length (number of bytes) of the last, vInt-encoded, block of posting in not known before all individual postings are read and decoded. When reading this block we only know the number of postings that should be read and decoded -- since vInts have different sizes by definition. If I wanted to copy the whole block without vInt decoding/encoding, I need to know how many bytes I have to read from postings index input. So, my question is: is there a clean way to determine the length of this block (ie. the number of bytes that this block has)? Is the number of bytes in a posting list tracked somewhere in Lucene 4.1 postings format? Thanks, Aleksandra
