Well, that was interesting. Whoosh got noticed in a few places, and a few people are playing with it. Now I need to work on three things.

• Documentation
• Finishing features
• Exploring performance

Documentation is what I'm going to be focusing on first, and right away. I think it's awesome that people are trying Whoosh out just based on docstrings and the GettingStarted page, but I really need to write a user guide, get down some design notes, and write about how to accomplish things in Whoosh. It would be cool to do a screencast or something too. But writing documentation is my day job; I need to find motivation to do it in my spare time too.

There are quite a few things that are coded and more-or-less-working-probably (e.g. highlighting search results excerpts) but not perfectly integrated, or wanting a better API. There are also some code I wrote just to get things to a releasable state that I need to revisit. That's what I'll probably work on after getting the documentation going.

Increasing performance is going to be tricky. Given the design parameters, I feel like I'm running up against the speed of the Python interpreter. Finding more performance may mean being extremely clever about doing less work, and exploring parallel processing. I can also try working with very large indexes and see what kind of tunable parameters might help with that.

Yay! Anonymous access to the whoosh repository is fixed.

To summarize the initial release of Whoosh, Day Two:

• I screwed up setup.py and uploaded incomplete distributions. Twice.

• Anonymous access isn't working for the Subversion repository. I've got a question in to my service provider about it, but until I get a reply there, try using username=guest and password=guest, with my apologies.

• Oh, and I need to write more unit tests, user docs, and figure out a way to integrate generated API docs with Trac.

Did I mention that I'm not a professional developer? I should probably put that on the wiki somewhere ;)

The trials, tribulations, and triumphs of one man's journey to create a kick-ass Python search engine library.

I finally mustered the courage to "de-cloak" and upload Whoosh to PyPI.

So of course I got the setup.py script wrong and uploaded an empty distribution.

What an auspicious beginning!