Is Sphinx really necessary?

[allspiritseve]

It may be a great search app and all, but it requires compiling from source and that seems like a lot to ask of all future talkingpoints volunteers who may not be as experienced with the command line. Would it be possible to stick with established gems that are available for most operating systems?

Edit: maybe it can be installed using a gem. I tried rake:gems install because that's what it told me to do, but that didn't help. The website seemed to indicate it had to be compiled from source in order to install. But then after I installed it still didn't work so I tried gem install thinking-sphinx and it appears to be working. So never mind :)

Cory

[jhilden]

I can understand the concerns, but unfortunately there is not decent fulltext search that comes only as a gem.

The only libraries that come as "gem only" are gems that help you a little bit in creating "LIKE %" SQL statements and such. but they don't really help you build and index.

I think it should still be possible for future devs to work on the TP without installing sphinx, since you only really need it when you want to work on the search results UI.

It would be great if you could help me to wirte some documentation explaining the different options with sphinx.

[allspiritseve]

"I think it should still be possible for future devs to work on the TP without installing sphinx, since you only really need it when you want to work on the search results UI."

When I pulled the latest changes and ran script/server, it failed and told me I had to install sphinx. Maybe it's being specified as a required dependency somewhere?

[jhilden]

I think the most basic thing to change would be to comment out the line
config.rem "thinking-sphinx"
in the environment.rb
(we might be able to move that line to config/environments/production.rb)

But there might very well be more dependencies.

[allspiritseve]

Cool, I did that. I'll commit it in a few minutes.

[allspiritseve]

Even though I commented out that line, I got this:

Sphinx cannot be found on your system. You may need to configure the following
settings in your config/sphinx.yml file:

• bin_path
• searchd_binary_name
• indexer_binary_name

when running rake db:seed. Any suggestions?

[jhilden]

We can't comment out the
config.rem "thinking-sphinx"
line in the repo because we need it for fulltext search to run on the serve. We would have to comment it out locally or use a different config file for dev mode.

The problem with the rake task seems to be this line:
http://github.com/jhilden/talkingpoints/blob/master/Rakefile#L12
The same as above is true here. Please, comment it out locally, but don't commit it to the repo.

But in general there should be a better solution for all of this.