I just stumbled on my answer without needing to use Josh's tip, but I 
will file it away for future reference. I try to 'discover' a new unix 
command each week, and 'od' is mine for the week. :)

my problem turned out to be that I was trying to merge two indexes that 
had the same properties and metanames, but they were listed in a 
different order in their respective config files. the resulting merge 
had the correct properties, but searching for meta=foo failed, even 
though a dump showed the correct value was present.

using the same config order solved the problem. my best guess is that 
swish stores numbers instead of metanames, and since those numbers are 
derived from the order of metanames in the config, the order is vital 
when merging.

thanks again, Josh.

Josh Rabinowitz wrote on 10/13/04 5:01 PM:

>> Josh Rabinowitz wrote on 10/13/04 4:53 PM:
>>
>>> Hey Peter:
>>>
>>> Maybe do a 'text dump' of each index using 'od', and diff those?
>>>
>>> That should help....
>>> joshr
>>>
>>>> I am doing some debugging and wonder if anyone knows some magic for
>>>> diff'ing two swish index files. 'diff' obviously (or not?) won't work


-- 
Peter Karman  -  http://www.cray.com/craydoc/ -  karman(at)not-real.cray.com