search

openzim / overview

:balloon: Start here for current projects, how to get involved, and joining community calls. A resource for new and veteran members of the offline commmunity
2 stars 1 forks source link

There are no portable (split) distributions of stackexchange ZIMs #2

Closed Jaifroid closed 6 years ago

Jaifroid commented 6 years ago

Not sure if this is the right place to note this issue. It may be "by design", which is fine, but at least one of the ZIMs for Stackexchange -- stackoverflow.com_eng_all_2017-05.zim -- is 52GB, so a split version could be useful if time/resources permit. Or if not, perhaps a README should be put in the /portable/stackexchange directory pointing people to the FAQ where it explains how to split files manually.

kelson42 commented 6 years ago

@Jaifroid I have started to slowly do not provide portable versions anymore. The reason is that we have now the embedded index which makes an external index useless. On the top of that, we have made a few changes in the ZIM format recently which bring a few problem with the old code to generate the external index. So, we hope to provide soon the first version of Kiwix-desktop 2.0 to allow users to fully enjoy the new ZIM files with embedded indexes. I will update the docs and wiki pages as soon as Kiwix-destkop 2.0 is put online.

Jaifroid commented 6 years ago

@kelson42, this issue was more about splitting very large files (.zimaa, .zimab, etc.) rather than about indexing. If you expect users to split the files themselves, then I would recommend putting a README in the portable folder for Stackexchange (or other empty folders) with an indication of what you say above and how people can split their own files.

kelson42 commented 6 years ago

@Jaifroid Why do we need a version with chunks? To support FAT32?

Jaifroid commented 6 years ago

I think FAT32 is the traditional reason, as explained in http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/FAQ/en . NB I'm not saying we need it any more if FAT32 has been superseded for thumb drives, etc. I don't really know what the common format is now -- exFAT?

kelson42 commented 6 years ago

Yes, exFAT is the future.