I'm the maintainer of Debian's lucene package, and I noticed interest in bringing pylucene into the distribution. [1] I am curious how that might work.
One possibility is for Debian's lucene package to do both javac and gcj compilation. It would provide both a java and native library version of lucene. Then a separate pylucene package would handle swig and creation of the python module. This would have the advantage of making lucene available to C programmers as well as python programmers. So my questions are: 1) Is this a reasonable approach? 2) I think it would work if the gcj step is simple and easily separable. It would not work if the lucene sources need to be patched in a pylucene specific way. I'm concerned about the lucene.patches file and wonder if they can be merged with lucene upstream or migrated to PyLucene.i 3) Is someone willing to help? I'm interested in native compilation in Debian's lucene package, but definitely need assistance. Cheers, Jeff [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256283