Erik has already made some good fllowup comments, but to address some specific points...
: What was the original thinking behind not having solr/home set in the : web.xml -- seems like an easier way to deal with this. because then people would *have* to unpack the war to change it ... some containers don't unpack the war anyway, let alone expect you to. it would also make upgrading difficult (right now, once you have a setup you like, you just replace the war ... if you had to edit the web.xml every time it would be a pain. : I would imagine most people are more familiar with setting params in : web.xml than manually creating Contexts for their webapp... Hmmmm.... "most people" is a broad term. "most java develpers" who are use to writting webapp themselves maybe. for non java people it's probably 50/50. And remember: you don't *have* to edit the context file ... Sol looks for the solr home dir 3 different ways, you only need to create/edit a context file *if*: 1) you are using tomcat 2) you want to specify the solr home using JNDI. : In fact I would take a step further and have a default value of : /opt/solr (or whatever...) and if a specific user wants to change it : they can just edit their web.xml? Solr does have a default: it's the current working directory, the one and only directory that Solr can be garunteed will exist on any users file system -- assuming /opt/solr would be very unix centric, and wouldn't be very nice to our windows users who are pretty happy with the default CWD or using a system property to set it at run time. : This would simplify the documentation, instead of configure your stuff : in the Context -- it becomes "this is the default", copy example/solr to the basic documentation for "running solr" is actaully pretty darn simple.. cd example; java -jar start.jar ...it doesn't get much simpler then that. where things get more complicated is in running solr in different containers, and using differnet container specific configuration mechanisms to set the solr home ... and even doesn't really seem all that complicated to me. -Hoss
