Sphinx backend about django-haystack

[toastdriven]

This is a similar situation as the Xapian backend (GPL issues) but also even further difficult by the way Sphinx works. I've spoken to davidcramer in the past for possible collaberation and it's on the list, but probably not a near-term thing.

[ryszard]

Yeah, I've been looking at both how Sphinx works and how Haystack backends work and making them work together seems rather non-trivial. There's one thing that looks kind of promising, though. It is possible to feed Sphinx with data in an XML format (described in the documentation). It works by providing a shell command in the configuration which Sphinx runs and takes XML data from. Generating XML data from Indexes shouldn't be to difficult, and this could be hooked to manage.py. OTOH I understand that Haystack wants to control when the indexes are updated, and I am not really sure how (and if) this is possible for Sphinx.

I am aware that the most sensible way for the Sphinx backend to happen would be that it got written by the person who wanted it most... At the moment probably me ;). However, I somehow cannot get my head around it... yet, I hope. Do you have any suggestions or starting points? Of course I could also use django-sphinx... But Haystack's interface seems so much better...

Oh, and maybe you could give me a link to the discussion with David Cramer? I remember seeing it somewhere, but Google Group search seems to let me down this time.

[dcramer]

I created a fork for this today to dig through the stuff, but since I haven't touched haystack, ever, it seems like it's going to be pretty time consuming for me to get up. Sadly, I can't commit a lot of time right now, so this may not happen by my hands either.

I keep adding more and more (sometimes, hackish) features to django-sphinx, and wonder if it'd just be easier to get it ported to Haystack, and get the features in over here.

[toastdriven]

I've been working on a backend on and off for the last two weeks. What I have done isn't ready for public consumption yet, though I'm trying to sneak it in for 1.1.

[dpwiz]

Any progress on this?

[toastdriven]

No, I've had no time since the last update to look at it.

[mlissner]

Just connecting dots, there has been some discussion of django-sphinx converting to Haystack over on it's forum: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-sphinx/LL1oWU5hDVk/discussion

It doesn't look like there is anybody there that can make it happen, which is a shame, but David Cramer is effectively bowing out of maintaining django-sphinx (I believe due to time constraints).

Bugs on django-sphinx have all but stalled (even easy ones with ready pull requests, I think), so that project is pretty much stagnant from what I can tell.

It'd be great to see Haystack take this over, but as I mention over there, I'm not the guy for the coding either...

[dbrgn]

+1 from my side for sphinx support. I've been using django-sphinx so far, but as it's basically dead, there's no point in improving it atm.

Would be great if someone could find time to do this.

[toastdriven]

You might all have a gander at the project mentioned in #485.