Release notes for Recoll 1.24.x

Caveats

The .xls (MS Excel) handler needs the python2 future package (for the builtins module).

Installing over an older version

Some of the input handlers were converted from shell scripts to Python programs, and some helper dependancies changed. For example, you will need to install python-libxml2 and python-libxslt1 in most cases (for replacing xsltproc).

1.20-24 indexes are fully compatible. Installing 1.24 over an 1.19 index is possible, but there have been small changes in the way compound words (e.g. email addresses) are indexed, so it will be best to reset the index. Still, in a pinch, 1.24 search can mostly use an 1.19 index.

New index format with Xapian 1.4: the default on-disk format of Xapian 1.4 (Glass) has changed to improve performance of phrase searches. This had the infortunate consequence of rendering the Recoll snippets generation method excessively slow except for very small indexes. In consequence, new indexes created by Recoll 1.24 using Xapian 1.4 have a different format and store the document texts inside the index. No specific action is required from the user, except if you have and old index and want to use the new format (nicer snippets, faster phrase searches), in which case you should delete the old index (see next).

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (e.g.: you're not sure it's at least 1.18). The best method is to quit all Recoll programs and delete the index directory ( rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex.
recollindex -z will do the same in most, but not all, cases. It's better to use the rm method, which will also ensure that no debris from older releases remain (e.g.: old stemming files which are not used any more).

Case/diacritics sensitivity is off by default. It can be turned on only by editing recoll.conf ( see the manual). If you do so, you must then reset the index.

Minor releases at a glance

• 1.24.5: prevent reset to former index format.
  • A recollindex -z would reset the new format (storing text, for snippets generation with Xapian 1.4) to the older one (with potential query performance issues).
• 1.24.4: Mainly a few MacOS fixes.
  • GUI preview: replace a number of hacks with modern Qt methods.
  • Misc changes to the Mac port and build.
  • Pstotext does not work any more. Use catdvi instead of dvips+pstotext for dvi, and ps2pdf + pdftotext for postscript.
• 1.24.3: fixes a potential (never reported) GUI crash and a couple of minor bugs.
  • Prevent text splitter bad array access and stl assertion crash (fedora rpmbuild) in marginal case. There was probably no real consequence beyond triggering the assertion.
  • GUI: the "Choose" label on the style sheet button would disappear when the file choice dialog was cancelled.
  • GUI: Saving queries: work around qt 5.9+ bug: defaultSuffix is not appended when choosing a save file name. The file could in consequence not be selected for loading.
• 1.24.2: very minor fixes.
  • Windows: switch to Xapian 1.4.5
  • Windows: fix advanced search directory filter.
  • GUI result table: URLs which are not UTF-8 are URL-encoded for display.
  • Updated the Python Epub module: the original version suffered from bitrot.
  • Plain text attachments were sometimes not shown if "Hide Duplicates" was selected.
  • Store origin db in document history so that documents from external indexes can be fetched.
  • Improve choice of suffix for temporary file of given MIME type.
• 1.24.1:
  • Fixes the "error 9 on netlink descriptor" GUI crash.
  • Add GUI option to activate links found in plain text in the preview window.
  • Add monitordirs configuration variable to define a subset of the whole indexed tree (topdirs) to be monitored for changes, and implement a method to get the recollindex command (executed without options) to trigger a running monitoring recollindex to perform an incremental on the whole tree. Together, these change make it easy to set up Recoll to index a big tree and only monitor a small subset for real time changes.

Changes in Recoll 1.24.0

The main change is the new snippets generation method.

• New snippets generation method, using document text stored in the index (default only for new indexes and Xapian 1.4, can be forced by setting iindexStoreDocText and deleting the old index).
• New range queries : fieldname:min..max, usable only if the field has been appropriately configured.
• Improved support for removable volumes.
• CHM and EPUB indexing: add chmcatenate and epubcatenate to specify that the contents should be indexed as a whole instead of broken up in chapters (resulting in a single search result for the document).
• Added -L option to recoll for forcing message language, overriding NLS environment.
• Fixed clicks on orthographic suggestions which did not work any more with qt5.
• All input handlers should now be compatible with Python3, but still use Python2.
• It should now be possible to use a readonly index directory for searches.
• New idxtexttruncatelen configuration variable to only index the beginning of documents.