The current interface exposed by Lucene4c requires the user to pass in a
path when a directory is needed, as opposed to using an actual directory
object.
Advantage: Less code to write, no need to create yet another object when
you want to access a local directory.
Disavantage: No way to use something other than what amounts to an
FSDirectory under the hood. Now most of the time what you want is an
FSDirectory, but there's nothing that requires that to be the case, and
other directory implementations do exist in the Java code that we could
wrap, not to mention the fact that we could provide our own interface
for implementing one in C.
Since C doesn't let you have multiple versions of a function with the
same name and different arguments, if we want to allow the user to use
both paths and directory objects that means two versions of every
function that takes a directory, with slightly different names, which I
don't particularly like.
I'm leaning towards going in and creating a directory object again (this
is what the pre-GCJ version of Lucene4c did, and it seemed reasonable),
and requiring people to create one before doing anything that requires a
directory. This way we retain the ability to add more directory types
in the future without screwing with the interface and without adding a
ton of extra functions.
Thoughts?
-garrett
path when a directory is needed, as opposed to using an actual directory
object.
Advantage: Less code to write, no need to create yet another object when
you want to access a local directory.
Disavantage: No way to use something other than what amounts to an
FSDirectory under the hood. Now most of the time what you want is an
FSDirectory, but there's nothing that requires that to be the case, and
other directory implementations do exist in the Java code that we could
wrap, not to mention the fact that we could provide our own interface
for implementing one in C.
Since C doesn't let you have multiple versions of a function with the
same name and different arguments, if we want to allow the user to use
both paths and directory objects that means two versions of every
function that takes a directory, with slightly different names, which I
don't particularly like.
I'm leaning towards going in and creating a directory object again (this
is what the pre-GCJ version of Lucene4c did, and it seemed reasonable),
and requiring people to create one before doing anything that requires a
directory. This way we retain the ability to add more directory types
in the future without screwing with the interface and without adding a
ton of extra functions.
Thoughts?
-garrett