Vsencoding for positionlist

apply vs encoding for positionlist
Um, I'm rather confused by this comment in particular, and what this patch is trying to do in general.

Currently, the document lengths are stored as a special **post** list, not a **position** list.

Have you just got the two mixed up, or are you actually proposing we store document lengths in the position list table instead?  If so, why does that seem like a better place for them?  I would have thought that we want the document lengths to be a chunked list (so we can efficiently skip, and so we can efficiently insert and delete documents from the middle), and the postlist table is set up to handle chunked lists already.  Basically, document lengths are much more like a posting list than they are like a position list.

If vsencoding is to be used only when the position list is used to store document length (as the comment says), then why have you removed the code to handle interpolative coding of positions?  If your plan is that term positions within documents should also be encoded with vsencoding instead of interpolative (and the comment here is wrong), then have you done tests to see what effect that has on space and speed performance?