Dear Petr
On 23.01.2015 11:59, Petr Bena wrote:
Some of you probably know kiwix -
kiwix.org which is
offline wikipedia
reader. I think the idea of this reader is cool, most of you probably
sometimes wanted to access wikipedia while being offline somewhere,
but couldn't. Kiwix can help with this, however it has one big problem
and solution for it is so complex that it would basically need a
rewrite of whole thing.
That problem is that you need to download pretty huge file (40+GB) in
order to use it for en wikipedia for example.
We provide smaller ZIM files providing selection of articles (have a
look on
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/). AFAIK, for the same amount of
information, we provide the best compression ratio (and consequently
potential update speed).
And if you wanted to
update those few wikipages you are interested in, to a latest
revision, then you again need to download that huge file.
That's a true, openZIM was thought, implemented and optimized for
read-only. But the sentence "solution for it is so complex that it would
basically need a rewrite of whole thing" is wrong.
Without repeating what Federico already said (later in this thread but
earlier last week), we have almost a solution (implemented by a GSOC
student) to make incremental upgrades. This solution works well but is a
little bit CPU intensive (due to the need to recompress clusters).
A "lazy" version of the patch functionality could fix that quickly (and
for small amounts of articles this would not make a big difference). An
"intelligent" version of diff/patch might avoid both the cluster
re-compression step and the continuous ZIM file growing might also be
implemented.
All of this might be implement in a few weeks by a skilled C++ developer
without the "rewrite of whole thing", just adding new functionnalities.
I have been working on this kind of stuff since almost ten years and
have seen a lot of different offline softwares proposed and part of them
published. None of the ones which brought a real added value to the
end-user was developed quicker than in a few weeks.
Regards
Emmanuel
--
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