nnir/wais

nnir/wais

[Harry Putnam]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gnu.emacs.gnus as well.


Posted to gnu.emacs.gnus and ding@gnus.org

Kai G has been very diligent about responding to any posts concerning
nnir.  

Are there any other readers here who are using freeWAIS as the engine for
nnir?

It seems that freeWAIS is not that easy to setup.  I know I've had
lots of trouble with it and still unable to get it working.  Although
Kai and another freeWAIS developer have helped well beyond the call of
duty.

I was able to get a short glimpse (pun intended) of the astounding
speed of freeWAIS in combination with nnir but have broken it somehow.
But I can report here that freeWAIS is easily several *hundred*
percentage points faster than glimpse.  

This post is a plea to users or interested parties of freeWAIS to
respond with any notes or tips that may help other users get freeWAIS
running as nnir engine.

Posting here seems like it would be appropriate for this group but if
interested parties would rather conduct private correspondence feel
free to do so.

The problems I've run into revolve around compiling the sources of
freeWAIS and once (sort of) compiled, getting it working from the
command line or with nnir.

This package is not well documented so something as simple as working
command lines for indexing and searching would be helpful.

The versions I've worked with are freeWAIS-2.1.13 and 2.1.14 available
at:
ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/src/freeWAIS-sf/