[LUCENE-1076] Allow MergePolicy to select non-contiguous merges

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.3
• Fix Version/s: 3.2, 4.0-ALPHA
• Component/s: core/index
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Michael McCandless
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 04/Dec/07 13:07
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 11:43
• Resolved: 14/May/11 12:45

Description

I started work on this but with LUCENE-1044 I won't make much progress
on it for a while, so I want to checkpoint my current state/patch.

For backwards compatibility we must leave the default MergePolicy as
selecting contiguous merges. This is necessary because some
applications rely on "temporal monotonicity" of doc IDs, which means
even though merges can re-number documents, the renumbering will
always reflect the order in which the documents were added to the
index.

Still, for those apps that do not rely on this, we should offer a
MergePolicy that is free to select the best merges regardless of
whether they are continuguous. This requires fixing IndexWriter to
accept such a merge, and, fixing LogMergePolicy to optionally allow
it the freedom to do so.