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