tl;dr Are there any plans to strong-name the Lucene.Net 4.8 assemblies in the beta Nuget packages? Is there some specific investigation needed that I could do? Any timeline for the next beta release? And does anyone know why 4.5.1 was chosen as the target framework for Lucene.Net 4.8?
Quick intro: I'm an engineering lead for the language understanding engine underlying the "Q&A" natural language query feature in Microsoft's Power BI product (internally known as "Lucia"). We would like to start using Lucene.Net to implement our index of the user's database string values (replacing current internal solutions which have some drawbacks). Our scenario is rather different from the typical application of Lucene but still needs much of the same underlying algorithms/features. I have a working implementation over Lucene.Net 3.0.3 but recently discovered that Lucene.Net 4.8 supports both store compression and memory-mapped files which would be useful for our scenario. Additionally, I came across this blog post<http://code972.com/blog/2016/07/98-lucene-net-4-8-is-in-beta-and-we-need-your-help> which suggests that Lucene.Net 4.8 should be a good option even in its current "beta" form. As I've started working with Lucene.Net 4.8, I hit two early roadblocks: 1. All of our assemblies are strong-named but the current Lucene.Net 4.8 beta packages on Nuget are not strong-named 2. Our codebase currently targets .NET 4.5 but Lucene.Net 4.8 targets 4.5.1 For 1), I was able to build a strong-named version of Lucene.Net 4.8 by cloning the git repo and using the Lucene.Net.snk included in the repo. I had to comment out these lines in the AssemblyInfo.cs for Lucene.Net (I haven't tried to build any other assemblies yet - for our usage, we'll probably only need the core Lucene.Net.dll as we'll provide our own analyzers and we build queries directly): // LUCENENET NOTE: For now it is not possible to use a SNK because we have unmanaged references in Analysis.Common. // However, we still need InternalsVisibleTo in order to prevent making everything public just for the sake of testing. // This has broad implications, though because many methods are marked "protected internal", which means other assemblies // must update overridden methods to match. /* [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests")] [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.TestFramework")] [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Highlighter")] // For Automaton [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.ICU")] // For Automaton [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Misc")] [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Suggest")] // For Automaton [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.Analysis.Common")] // For Automaton [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.Highlighter")] // For Automaton [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.ICU")] // For Analysis.Util.TestSegmentingTokenizerBase [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.Misc")] [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.QueryParser")] [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Lucene.Net.Tests.Cli")] // For lucene-cli */ I didn't see any issue in JIRA for this comment. Does anyone have more context on the problem? I don't recall any issues with unmanaged references and strong names (we have both unmanaged references from C# DLLs and Managed C++ DLLs in our codebase) but might not fully understand the comment. I could look into this further but wondering if anyone has more information before I try to start blind. For 2), I also changed the target framework in the assembly I built to temporarily unblock our development. We are planning to move to 4.5.2 target since both 4.5 and 4.5.1 haven't actually been supported since 2016. I'm curious though why 4.5.1 was targeted specifically for Lucene.Net since there weren't many significant changes in that version? In any case though this shouldn't be a blocker for us (while we'll do some development on the 4.5 target at the moment, we're of course running 4.6 or later on our development machines so I don't expect any differences between 4.5 and 4.5.1 target). Two other questions: 1. I've seen mention recently that another beta release is planned soon. Any timeline on this? We can ship a strong-named version of Lucene.Net built ourselves but would prefer an official release if possible. I'm assuming that when the strong name is added to the Lucene.Net assembly it will use the Lucene.Net.snk already present in the repo so we should go ahead and use that key as well? 2. The blog post referenced above also mentioned that a significant amount of contribution to Lucene.Net 4.8 was done by Microsoft employees. Does anyone have names or contact info for some of these people? I would love to reach out internally to understand these contributions and how Lucene.Net 4.8 is being used elsewhere at Microsoft as this will help us coordinate our plans and any potential contributions. Thanks for your help and all the great work on Lucene.Net 4.8. We're very excited to be able to leverage this in our product. Aaron Meyers Senior Software Engineer Microsoft Power BI
