[Brug-talk] Ferret - sphinx - Solr

[Alain Ravet]

  > Well ... it looks like we have a topic for a BoF (Beards of a
Feather) at the
  > Ruby and Rails room at fosdem ...

At this stage, what could we say other than :
 - "Ferret is a great tool but in the past some people have had some
unacceptable stability problems in some conditions.".
Said that way, only a russian-roulette fan - if there are any left -
would seem justified to use it.


Some facts :
1)- Ferret is fast, powerful and, with aaf, very simple to use and tune.
2)- Ferret has some unique (*1) features. If you depend on them, ...
3)- some "big" applications use it with success
, but
4)- some renowned Rails people have had problems - in the past - with
Ferret stability.
and
5) Ferret+aaf is customizable (so you can mess-up with it)


   (*1) you could use a Java+Lucene server, but it's much more complex
to install,
        use and maintain.


This conversation should continue in the Ferret forum. I've used
Ferret with success, and in one case it would be very hard to replace,
but all those trouble reports are scary.

I would like the people who have experienced serious enough problems
to make them turn away from Ferret to tell their stories with some
details. For example :
- did they use a recent version of Ferret/AAF?
- did they use it through a (Drb) server?
- did they use it out-of-the box, or did they customize it?
- did they use the basics features, or some of the advanaced features
(multi-indexes, etc..)
- etc..


Alain Ravet