[Xapian-discuss] Running two versions of Xapian on one server

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 08:15:25AM +0000, Francis Irving wrote:
> I would like to run a (much!) newer version on the same server at the
> same time as the old one. This is so the website and existing indexer
> can continue to run, while I build the new index and check things
> work with the new version.

There's another approach to this (which I mentioned to Francis in person
last weekend, but might be of wider interest) - you can create a chroot
environment with the new stuff in and use that.  This keeps everything
nicely segregated, so there's no danger of damaging the live
installation while setting up the new version for testing, and it's easy
to clean up the test environment once you've migrated the live
installation.

Building the chroot is easy on Debian (use debootstrap or cdebootstrap).
I'm not sure if other distros or operating systems have similar tools.
If not, it's possible to do by hand if you know what you're doing.

Or instead of a chroot, use a full virtualised environment (with
Xen or UML or something similar) - similar conceptually to using a
chroot as above, but rather different technologically.

Cheers,
    Olly