<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Recoll known bugs</title>
<meta name="Author" content="Jean-Francois Dockes">
<meta name="Description"
content="recoll is a simple full-text search system for unix and linux based on the powerful and mature xapian engine">
<meta name="Keywords" content="full text search, desktop search, unix, linux">
<meta http-equiv="Content-language" content="en">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="robots" content="All,Index,Follow">
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="styles/style.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="rightlinks">
<ul>
<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="download.html">Downloads</a></li>
<li><a href="doc.html">Documentation</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="content">
<h1>Known bugs in current and older versions</h1>
<p><i>Bugs that are listed in an older version section are supposedly fixed in
later versions. Bugs listed in the topmost section may also exist in older
versions.</i></p>
<h2><a name="b_latest">recoll 1.23.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>When indexedmimetypes is set and does not include text/html (or
if text/html is excluded by excludedmimetypes), PDF (and other)
contents will not be indexed because the file handler initially
produces text/html. The workaround is to include text/html in the
processed types, and maybe use suffix exclusion if you really
don't want to index html files. This is fixed in development code,
will be in the next release.</li>
<li>The Recoll GUI configuration (things set from the <tt>GUI
Configuration</tt> menu) is stored in a file
named <tt>~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf</tt>, which is
completely distinct from the indexing configuration. There have
been several instances of problems leading to corruption of the
file in the past. If the Recoll GUI behaves strangely in any way
when starting up (crashes, starts slowly, uses a lot of
memory...), it may be worth it trying to move this file aside
and re-try starting the GUI.</li>
<li>There have been multiple occurrences of an indexing problem
resulting in a damaged index. The cause is not completely determined,
but there is a suspicion that a Xapian bug may be involved at least
in some cases. The index is damaged in such a way that some search
results are missing, and that many document up-to-date checks can
fail. This makes partial/incremental indexing very expensive because
many documents are reindexed (for nothing, the index data is lost
anyway).<br/>
You can see a partial description in Bitbucket Recoll issue #257, but
part of the discussion happened on the Xapian mailing list.<br/>
The problem would signal itself by the following kind of message in
the indexer log:<br/>
<pre><tt>
:2:../rcldb/rcldb.cpp:1818:Db::needUpdate: get_document error: Document XX not found
</tt></pre>
Also, messages about Xapian being unable to read some blocks. More
generally, any error message (beginning with :2:) originating in the rcldb
module is highly suspicious.<br/>
If you get this message, the index is damaged, only deleting it and
reindexing can recover it.<br/>
Olly Betts, the Xapian index developper, thinks that the origin may
be a problem which was fixed in Xapian 1.2.21, so, updating Xapian
may help. All Xapian 1.2.x versions are binary-compatible (you can
just drop them on Recoll), and there are backports repository for
several common Linux versions, get in touch if you have a
problem.<br/>
</li>
<li>For indexes with case and diacritics sensitivity (not the
default), the autocasesens and autodiacsens configuration variable do
not work as described in the manual (they have no effect).</li>
<li>The GUI must be restarted after changing the path translation
values (ptrans), even when they are changed from the GUI
preferences.</li>
<li>On old systems such as Debian Squeeze which use Evince version
2.x (not 3.x) as PDF viewer, the default "Open" command for PDF
files will not
work. You need to use the GUI preferences tool to change the
--page-index option to --page-label for the evince command line
used for PDF.</li>
<li id="aspelljessie">
The aspell command used to generate the orthographic correction
dictionary is broken on Debian Jessie, because of an aspell
packaging mistake which will not be fixed for the release. Try the
following command, replacing 'en' by your language code:
<pre><tt>
/usr/bin/aspell --lang=en --encoding=utf-8 create master /tmp/dict.rws
</tt></pre>
If it complains about a missing <tt>/usr/share/aspell/en.dat</tt>,
the workaround is to link the <tt>.dat</tt> files from
<tt>/usr/lib/aspell</tt> to <tt>/usr/share/aspell</tt>:
<pre><tt>
cd /usr/share/aspell
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/aspell/*.dat .
</tt></pre>
</li>
<li>It will sometimes happen that the result list paragraph format stored in
the Qt preferences file will get garbled, causing result lists with no
displayed paragraphs (the counts and pages are ok, the results can be seen
in table mode, but not in list mode). The workaround is to go to
<blockquote>
Preferences->Query configuration->User interface
</blockquote>
and erase the result paragraph format string (^A DEL in the text area),
this will reset the string to the default value.</li>
<li>A release 1.19 change in the way we handle minus characters
('-') broke support for wildcard character ranges (e.g.: <tt>[a-z]</tt>).
A fix would be relatively complicated, so please speak up if you
need it because I won't probably do it without further
motivation.</li>
<li>Real time indexer: when running with gamin on FreeBSD, the indexer can
deadlock in the gamin dialog in some cases.</li>
<li>After an upgrade, the recoll GUI sometimes crashes on startup. This is
fixed by removing (back it up just in case)
~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf, the QSettings storage for
recoll.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_23_1">recoll 1.23.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The indexer could crash because of an insufficient reset of
splitter state between text splitter invocations. By chance,
this apparently occurred more rarely than looking at the rather
coarse bug would have had me believe...</li>
<li>Advanced search clause list size explosion: the size of an
advanced search clause list originally set longer than the default
(5 clauses) would double each time the GUI preferences window was
closed and reopened during a session. Depending on usage, this
could end up with a huge list causing very slow GUI startup times
and even crashes.</li>
<li>Avoid applying the aspell speller to CJK data which it can't
process. Will avoid non-sensical suggestions when a search for a
CJK term does not find documents.</li>
<h2><a name="b_1_22_2">recoll 1.22.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The Python module limits result fetches to the Xapian result
count, which is estimated and usually smaller than the actual
number of results which can be read.</li>
<li>A bug in the text splitter made it impossible to match, for
example, filename:doc$ for files with names containing a space or
other word-breaking character before the '.'</li>
<li>The change from 'file' to 'xdg-mime' as file type identifier
command caused problem for some types of files (.java, .sql), because
of new and different returned types. Fixed by a mimemap/mimeconf
adjustment.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_22_0">recoll 1.22.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li><a name="GUIADV" />GUI: Starting the advanced search tool may
crash the GUI if the saved configuration has more than the default
count of search clauses (five). The bug is present in 1.21 only
There is an easy
workaround: edit <tt>~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf</tt> and
delete the line which begins
with <tt>prefs\adv\clauseList=</tt></li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_21_6">recoll 1.21.6</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The GUI dumps core on exit on Fedora23 + qt5 (maybe on other
platforms too). This has no real consequences apart from an
ennoying system pop up).</li>
<li>Starting the advanced search tool may crash the GUI if the saved
configuration has more than the default count of search clauses
(five).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_21_4">recoll 1.21.4</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The query language parser interprets incorrectly queries having
multiple MIME type or category specifications, with missing
results as a consequence. This affects all 1.21 versions up to
1.21.5 where it is fixed.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_21_2">recoll 1.21.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Indexed file paths have a limit around 1010 after which the
results can't be properly displayed in the GUI (the files are
indexed and can be found, and displayed by a command line search,
but the GUI display is garbled).</li>
<li>A bug in the verification of configuration file path variables
generates spurious warnings from recollindex
when the skippedPaths variable contains elements with
wildcards. This has no consequence except for the spurious error
message.</li>
<li>Web cache: the GUI config tool capped the cache size at
1 GB, and actually reset a bigger size
utility.</li>
<li>The directory filter for advanced search in "Any Clause" mode:
would not filter but add an ORed clause.</li>
<li>Parentheses around phrases would trigger a syntax error.</li>
<li>Fixed a few boundary conditions detected by VC++</li>
<li>External filters had no memory usage limit.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_20_1">recoll 1.20.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The web history queue is not processed by the real time indexer</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_14_p2">recoll 1.19.14p2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The Open/LibreOffice document filter does not output white space
for tab-separated words in input, leading to search failures.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_14p1">recoll 1.19.14p1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The Py_INCREF fix in 1.19.14p1 activated a bug in the Query
object iterator, a missing INCREF this time.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_14">recoll 1.19.14</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>A stray Py_INCREF causes a descriptor and memory leak in the Python
module. This can typically cause the program to come out of
descriptors after a couple hundred requests (seen in the
recoll-webui server).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_13">recoll 1.19.13</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Indexing child process could hang during the fork-exec interval
and cause a 20 mn filter timeout.</li>
<li>The use of separate read/write Xapian Database objects could cause
errors while checking the up-to-date status of documents.</li>
<li>Doc category filter names displayed in combobox were incorrect
when the order#:name format was used.</li>
<li>An off-by-one error causes an array overflow while handling too
deeply embedded documents (more than 20-deep). This can mostly
happen on a well-known pathologic recursive zip file sample. The
error crashes recollindex on 32 bits architectures, apparently not
on 64 bits ones.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_12">recoll 1.19.12</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>For all 1.19 releases including 1.19.12, there have been reports
of crashes of the multithreaded indexer. These events are quite
rare, and, as far as I know, they can be worked around by disabling
multithreading (add
thrQSizes = -1 -1 -1) to
~/.recoll/recoll.conf). They may result in a corrupted index (run
recollindex -z if this happens). This was supposedly fixed in 1.19.13.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_8">recoll 1.19.8</a></h2>
<ul>
<li><em><b>Date range computation is buggy and produces bad values for
the remaining days of the last month, possibly resulting in
missing results</b></em>.</li>
<li>It is possible to crash the GUI by interacting while a query
is active.</li>
<li>Backslashes inside the document abstract can corrupt the
index document data record.</li>
<li>Toggling an advanced search entry from phrase to proximity then
back leaves the slack at 10.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_7">recoll 1.19.7</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Stripping diacritics is wrong for Hindi.</li>
<li>The Python highlighter can produce incorrect end tags.</li>
<li>The result table dups and snippets links do not work.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_4">recoll 1.19.4</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Indexing CIFS/SMBFS kernel mounts is impossible because an empty
mime_type extended attribute is
<a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59811">
returned by the kernel</a> for all files, rendering actual
identification impossible. You can probably use a FUSE mount as
a workaround.
</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_3">recoll 1.19.3</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Absolute paths computations are broken by
recollindex changing its working directory to /tmp, so that giving
relative paths to e.g. "recollindex -i" would fail.</li>
<li>The Unity Lens would fail when the query terms had accented
characters (or were completly non-ascii, like, for example,
Japanese text).</li>
<li>The "autophrase" feature could sometimes create false
matches.</li>
<li>There are a number of problems when using multiple indexes which
could contain identical paths values for actually different
documents (on different volumes).</li>
<li>The history list window shows snippets links, which display an
error message when used and make no sense (no query data).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_2">recoll 1.19.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The Snippets link was sometimes missing from a result list entry
(for documents with an actual <tt>abstract</tt> metadata
field).</li>
<li>The <tt>Open Parent</tt> entry was sometimes missing from the
result list popup menu.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_1">recoll 1.19.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>An error in the path translation feature for additional indexes
caused access errors and confusing messages.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_19_0">recoll 1.19.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Using a "file name" clause inside advanced search crashes the
GUI because of a bug in the search history feature.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_18_2">recoll 1.18.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>When no indexing helper applications are actually missing, an ennoying
popup is shown in the GUI at each end of a batch indexing run (it's
supposed to be shown only once).</li>
<li>Category (media, message, etc.) expansion does not work for mime types
which have no associated filter. This is quite often the case for video
types (so they won't be found under "media"). <br>
There is a possible imperfect workaround. Create a filter shell-script
named rclbad inside the filters directory, with only an 'exit 1' inside it,
make it executable and associate it to the video types, in
~/.recoll/mimeconf:
<pre>[index]
video/mp2p = exec rclbad
video/mp2t = exec rclbad
video/mp4 = exec rclbad
video/avi = exec rclbad
video/divx = exec rclbad
video/x-msvideo = exec rclbad</pre>
</li>
<li>It is possible to add an external index with a case/diacritics stripping
option different from the main index'. Searches will mostly not work.</li>
<li>fnmatch() errors sometimes encountered because of character set and
locale issues were treated as matches.</li>
<li>When an advanced search finds no result, the spelling suggestions screen
which is displayed contains links which can only be useful for a simple
search. Clicking them will result in confusion.</li>
<li>When the real-time indexer updates a compound document which has been
shortened (typically, a truncated mbox folder), the obsolete documents
beyond the new end are not deleted, resulting in confusing behaviour.</li>
<li>Expansions of '*' inside a field were sometimes done against the whole
index, resulting in much degraded performance.</li>
<li>Wildcards were wrongly handled when splitting a string before a query, so
that things like <tt>recoll@*</tt> could end up being split as <tt>recoll
*</tt>.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_18_1">recoll 1.18.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>When using the Firefox plugin, increasing the web cache size only has an
effect when initially creating the cache. If the cache already exists, you
need to delete it for the new limit to take effect.</li>
<li>Sizes for documents bigger than 2 GB are improperly displayed.</li>
<li>Wildcards expressions sometimes cause false matches because of issues in
handling errors from fnmatch(). This will only occur in an UTF-8 locale
where file name conversion errors are possible (for old 8bit file
names).</li>
<li>CHM files character encoding is sometimes wrongly processed.</li>
<li>Sorting by field 'relevancyrating' is not equivalent to natural Xapian
ordering.</li>
<li>Weird data in filter output text (e.g.: produced by some versions of
pdftotext) can cause an error which will halt the processing of the
document, which becomes unsearchable. This is a relatively uncommon problem
which signals itself by a specific error in the indexing log, so you can
know if you are affected. Look for: <tt>xapian add_posting error Empty
termnames aren't allowed</tt> </li>
<li>Raw indexes (not default): diacritics and case expansion is not applied
to terms containing numbers so that a case-insensitive search does not work
for them (e.g.: searching for ds1820 will not find DS1820).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_18_0">recoll 1.18.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Thumbnails are not found on newer desktops (e.g. Ubuntu Quantal) because
of a change in the freedesktop.org "standard".</li>
<li>A bug in extracting search term from click data in the snippet window
results in passing an incorrect term to the viewer. Only affects non-ascii
terms.</li>
<li>Using the snippets window can sometimes crash the GUI.</li>
<li>Tilde expansion is not properly performed for the "beaglequeuedir"
parameter. This only affects people who develop scripts over the queue
feature.</li>
<li>The missing filter recording code is broken.</li>
<li>Opening embedded documents from the Unity Lens does not work.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_17_3">recoll 1.17.3</a></h2>
<p>Fixed in 1.17.4 and 1.18:</p>
<ul>
<li>The real time monitor can be terminated for permissions-related addwatch
errors that should be non-fatal.</li>
<li>text/plain files are sometimes opened as csv (using a spreadsheet...)</li>
<li>Tilde expansion was wrong for the beaglequeuedir/webqueuedir variable,
causing problem when using the new Web history indexer module with
1.17.</li>
<li>Fixed relatively benign memory leak in the filters cache handler.</li>
<li>Prevent document indexing truncation caused by unac in some marginal case
which became quite common with the recent versions of pdftotext.</li>
</ul>
<p>Only fixed in the 1.18 branch:</p>
<ul>
<li>Messages in Qt standard dialog messages are not translated.</li>
<li>The unac_except_trans mechanism can generate wrong character translations
in some cases.</li>
<li>ODF documents exported by Google docs are badly processed.</li>
<li>It is impossible to open the parent of an embedded document (e.g. the CHM
file for an HTML page inside the CHM) if the parent is itself a member of
an archive.</li>
<li>Text inside malformed HTML files (appearing before a <body> tag, or
after a second one, or after a </body> tag is not indexed. As it
would be displayed by current browsers, this is wrong.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_17_2">recoll 1.17.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>It appears that recollindex will sometimes crash while indexing mail
files. There are 2 separate reports about this, and no resolution for now.
This is not specific to 1.17 as one of the reports is for 1.16. Refs: <a
href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=819408">Fedora</a>
(maildir, processing an attachment), <a
href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/recoll/+bug/994228">Ubuntu</a>:
apparently (no stack trace): <em>Recoll was indexing files in .thunderbird
when the crash occurred. It seemed to be indexing the INBOX file on disk.
</em> </li>
<li>There were a few small glitches when paging the result list, for example
going back from the last page.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_17_1">recoll 1.17.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>You can crash the GUI by starting simultaneous queries, which could be
accomplished among others by quickly clicking the sort order buttons.</li>
<li>When external indexes set as active are not actually present, the GUI
fails to open the db. It should automatically inactivate them instead.</li>
<li>Does not display thumbnails for files with an URL which should be encoded
(ie: with embedded spaces).</li>
<li>chm filter: url-encoded internal paths are mishandled.</li>
<li>Does not compile on Solaris (flock() issue).</li>
<li>The KDE recoll applet does not work.</li>
<li>configure --disable-python-module breaks the installation script.</li>
<li>The version string is not correctly updated for 1.17.1, the help dialog
and recollindex -v will print 1.17.0.</li>
<li>The HTML output from Python (rclexecm) filters is not correctly
escaped.</li>
<li>Does not compile with gcc 4.7 (missing include).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_17_0">recoll 1.17.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The chm filter handles badly some CHM files with encoded internal URLs
(the whole file or some parts are not indexed). There is an updated filter
on the filters section of the download page.</li>
<li>The application style sheet is not reapplied when changed from the
preferences menu, you have to restart the GUI.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_16_2">recoll 1.16.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Real time indexer: directory moves are not handled at all. Workaround:
restart indexer from time to time.</li>
<li>Real time indexer: file move events are not detected when running with
inotify (at least for recent versions). Workaround: restart indexer from
time to time.</li>
<li>Cancelling a preview in the GUI will also cancel the indexing thread if
it is running.</li>
<li>Under Solaris, it is necessary to perform the initial indexing with the
recollindex program. For some unknown reason, the recoll index thread does
not work for creating the database. The only idea I have is a problem with
exception handling (recoll catches an exception while trying the yet
inexistant db).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_16_1">recoll 1.16.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>At least on OpenSUSE 12.1 / Qt 4.7.4 (and probably other environments),
the links to Preview or Open inside the result list do not work. Also the
GUI can crash if a temporary directory creation fails.</li>
<li>The Python filters can crash under certain error conditions. This is a
benign error, affecting just the current document, but it causes system
reports.</li>
<li>The query is run 2 times, in most cases. This does not cause a too
dramatic performance impact because of caching but still...</li>
<li>The output from some filters (most typically text files out from the zip
filters) is sometimes not transcoded correctly to UTF-8, causing myriads of
error messages (and a possible application crash due to another bug in the
unac code, described further).</li>
<li>There is a compilation issue on Linux systems with a 3.x kernel.</li>
<li>Queries without search terms (ie: all files of a given mime type) fail
with an "empty query" diagnostic.</li>
<li>The recollq command line query program sometimes does not clean up its
temporary directory.</li>
<li>Indexing can crash on files with weird names (inconsistent with the
locale) for which the format of the "file -i" command is unexpected. This
is probably dependant on the type of system and/or locale. Workaround:
arrange for the offending file not to be indexed (move it away or configure
it out), or apply <a href="files/patch-badfileoutput.diff">this patch</a>,
which should work with all versions from 1.13 to 1.16.1</li>
<li>Under certain conditions, the indexer can use all available memory and
crash. This is caused by a memory leak in an error handling path inside
unac, and can only be triggered in specific conditions (all cases seen were
from files inside zip archives). Workaround: arrange for the offending file
not to be indexed (move it away or configure it out), or apply <a
href="files/patch-unac-icclose.diff">this patch</a>, which should work with
all versions from 1.13 to 1.16.1</li>
<li>The lyx filter does not correctly detect the Lyx version, needed for
correct indexing.</li>
<li>A typo in a memory reallocation call inside the firefox web history
indexing module may cause problems in a highly improbable case.</li>
<li>Directory creations are not processed by the real time indexer (for
indexing directory names).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_16_0">recoll 1.16.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The <tt>recoll</tt> GUI program sometimes crashes when running a query
while the indexing thread is active. Possible workarounds:<br>
<ul>
<li>Upgrade to 1.16.1</li>
<li>Use the command line <tt>recollindex</tt> program to perform indexing
(usually just type "recollindex" in a console, or see "man
recollindex").</li>
<li>Do not run queries in <tt>recoll</tt> while the indexing thread is
running (as indicated in the bottom status line).</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_15_7">recoll 1.15.7</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The default filter for files in Microsoft Word format
(application/msword, .doc), antiword, has trouble with some relatively rare
files with a very small text, resulting in the following error message:
<blockquote>
I'm afraid the text stream of this file is too small to handle.
</blockquote>
Only small files produced by Microsoft Word on a Mac, or by OpenOffice will
trigger this message.<br>
<b>Workaround</b>: install wvWare and modify mimeconf to use the rcldoc
filter (instead of directly executing antiword). Rcldoc will try antiword,
then will use vwWare if it is available. This will result in slightly
slower indexing for all normal .doc files. This fix was made the default in
1.16</li>
<li>Compressed man pages could not be previewed.</li>
<li>Sorting by document and file size in the result table does not work.</li>
<li>idxflushmb was not handled while deleting documents in the index, leading
to almost unbounded memory usage.</li>
<li>Email messages for which there would be an error indexing an attachment
would not be indexed at all.</li>
<li>Performing a full index with release 1.11 or newer, over a version
created with a much older recoll release may sometimes end with an error
saying "backend doesn't implement metadata". If this happens, you need to
delete the index directory (typically <em>~/.recoll/xapiandb/</em>) and
restart indexing. For big indexes, to avoid losing time, removing the
directory preventively may be preferable .</li>
<li>Text files bigger than 2 GB can not be indexed.</li>
<li>Using the GUI preview while the indexing thread is running will sometimes
crash the GUI or provoke other strangeness. This happens much more rarely
than in 1.15.7, but still occurs. Workaround if this happens too
frequently: use the standalone recollindex program instead of the GUI
thread.</li>
<li>Real time indexer: uncontrolled concurrent access to the global
configuration can cause a startup crash (mostly of big file trees because
of timing issues).</li>
<li>Using the result preview while the indexing thread is running will
sometimes crash the GUI or provoke other strangeness. This is apparently
due to insufficient protection of resources shared by several threads.
After recent cleanup, the problem occurs quite seldom but it is not
completely gone. The current and unsatisfying workaround, is to avoid the
situation, for example by using the standalone recollindex program instead
of the GUI indexing thread.</li>
<li>The GUI preview function sometimes fails with a non-sensical message
about a non-related missing helper.</li>
<li>Most operations on the parent document in the result table view are not
connected and do nothing.</li>
<li>The operations on the parent document in the result list right click menu
(Preview and Open), do not work, they access the file's parent directory
instead.</li>
<li>The GUI option to remember sort state between invocations only works for
sort by date.</li>
<li>The rclzip filter can't handle utf-8 in path names for archive members.
An <a href="http://www.recoll.org/filters/rclzip">updated filter</a> is
available. </li>
<li>The rclzip and rclchm filters can't handle archive members with a colon
(':') in the file name or path. The files are normally indexed and can be
searched for, but they can't be displayed (neither opened nor previewed).
There is a <a
href="https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/changeset/3751ea8ea179">patch</a>
which fixes the issue (then needs full reindex for these files).</li>
<li>The ignored suffixes list (recoll_noindex) is itself ignored in some
cases.</li>
<li>The man filter creates groff temporary png files in the home
directory.</li>
<li>Indexing can hang or crash after an error occurs on an archive member
(which should have affected only the relevant document).</li>
<li>The initial indexing pass in the real-time indexer does not monitor the
X11 session which can create problems if the user ends the section at this
point.</li>
<li>Starting the indexing thread inside the GUI while another indexer (batch
or real-time) is active will silently failed. It should show an error
dialog.</li>
<li>When an open error occurs on an external index while starting the GUI,
the initial indexing dialog is started, which is incorrect because it
cannot fix the problem.</li>
<li>The result table row height is not adjusted according to default font
size, and the vertical position of text in cells is often bad.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_15_5">recoll 1.15.5</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The Python and PHP modules in 1.15.5 have compile errors. This is solved
by <a href="https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/changeset/0b09b33cd06a">this
simple change.</a></li>
<li>The current stemming language is not indicated by menu checkboxes.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_15_2">recoll 1.15.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>If a result table column is both added and moved in the same GUI
instance, the list becomes garbled (or/and the GUI crashes). Workaround:
remove the Qt GUI config (.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf), and perform the
operation in 2 GUI sessions: add column, exit recoll, restart, move
column.</li>
<li>Clicking one of the category filter checkboxes (one of the
media/message/text/... things) with an empty result list crashes the GUI
(just like this, yeah, I know, quality insurance etc.). Workaround: don't
click these before running the first query.</li>
<li>Changing the indexing configuration parameters from the GUI while the
indexing thread (not an external recollindex command) is running will
sometimes (quite often) crash the GUI.</li>
<li>Script files (ie: .sh .pl) indexed as text do not respect the maximum
text file limit (a problem with, ie, shar archives identified as
application/x-shellscript).</li>
<li>indexing script for xml formats (ie: svg) sometimes stall for 30 S while
xsltproc tries to access remote dtds.</li>
<li>recollindex inapproprietely sets the nice value for its whole process
group. In certain cases where the indexing monitor was launched at session
start, this could set the whole session to low priority!</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_4">recoll 1.14.4</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>rclmon.sh stop would not work.</li>
<li>Some shell, awk, and perl scripts are not indexed. There is a simple <a
href="https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/issue/39/some-shell-and-other-scripts-are-not">configuration
tweak</a> workaround </li>
<li>The tree walk in indexing could loop on symbolic links.</li>
<li>If the user-chosen result list entry format results in several paragraphs
(in the qt textedit sense), right clicks will only work inside the first
one for each entry.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_3">recoll 1.14.3</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Email message preview is broken.</li>
<li>The new mutagen-based audio tags filter (rclaudio) only works with very
recent mutagen versions. See <a href="filters/filters.html">here</a> for a
corrected version.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_1">recoll 1.14.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Compressed file view fix broke help viewer.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_0">recoll 1.14.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Does not compile with Xapian 1.2. Apply <a
href="files/xapian12.patch">patch</a>.</li>
<li>When a mime type has an external viewer defined, but the actual file is
compressed (ie: xxx.txt.gz), recoll will try to start the external viewer
on the compressed file, which will not work in most cases.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_04">recoll 1.13.04</a></h2>
<p><b>Note:</b> some of the bugs listed here are not actually "fixed", mostly
they were problems caused by old versions of external software (ie: kde, qt),
and I stopped carrying them. Just don't use these versions, or live with the
problem.</p>
<ul>
<li>In case a new style filter (persistent) crashed while indexing, it was
not restarted, and all further files of the same mime type were not updated
(ie: python zip crash on encrypted files).</li>
<li>Mac OS X + Qt 4.6.1 : the index configuration dialog crashes. Fixed with
Qt 4.7.</li>
<li>If you are seeing a delay of a few seconds before the result list
displays for the first query of a recoll instance, try changing the result
list font in the query preferences. This is not a recoll problem, I don't
know the exact cause (I've seen it happen with "Sans Serif" and go away
with Helvetica or Arial).</li>
<li>It seems that the recoll program sometimes segfaults when exiting after
the first execution ?</li>
<li>When Recoll is built with qt 4.4.0, the icons in the result list are all
displayed at the top of the page and garbled. This appears to be a qt bug,
fixed in 4.4.1. Use either qt 4.3.x or 4.4.1 (stopped carrying this bug.
Just don't use 4.4.0)</li>
<li>Under some versions of KDE (ie: Fedora FC5 KDE 3.5.4-0.5.fc5), there is a
problem with the window stacking order. Opening the "browse" file selection
dialog from the advanced search dialog will stack the latter under the main
window, possibly making it invisible. This is quite probably a Kwin bug,
possibly related to http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79183 or a
correction thereof.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_02">recoll 1.13.02</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Stemming does not work in the 1.13 series. The stemming database was not
created at all. Things would sort of work as long as an older stemming
database was around (which is why this was not discovered earlier.</li>
<li>Fix the lyx filter to properly handle embedded white space in file
paths.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_01">recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The GUI display is garbled under Qt 4.6.1 and newer. This is a Qt bug,
and a workaround was put in place in Recoll 1.13.02 for Qt 4.6.1. If you
are using a newer version and the problem is still there, you can fix the
4.6.1 fix to hopefully work with your Qt version: edit qtgui/rclmain_w.h,
around line 37 (there is only one instance), change:
<pre> #if QT_VERSION == 0x040601
to
#if QT_VERSION >= 0x040601</pre>
</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_00">recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The field value was ignored in field searches for phrases or capitalized
words (ie: author:John or title:"the title").</li>
<li>The GUI would sometimes crash during the first execution, after the
dialog about starting configuration.</li>
<li>kio-recoll was not fully updated for 1.13 internals.</li>
<li>Would not compile on Solaris 8.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_4">1.12.4</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>There are two bugs specific to 64 bits system, affecting HTML display
inside the preview window (wrong character set used in some cases, and
problems with keyword highlighting). </li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_3">1.12.3</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Specific File Name searches and Query Language searches for a 'filename:'
field sometimes give different results due to the way we handle wild card
expansion.</li>
<li>Killing recollindex sometimes left filter processes sleeping around.</li>
<li>The last entry in a configuration file was ignored if it was not followed
by a newline (either the file had no ending newline or the line ended with
backslash followed by the last file line.</li>
<li>Non-ascii characters in path names did not work well from the
configuration GUI (editing the configuration files did work).</li>
<li>Accented characters in mail headers encoded according to a lax
interpretation of rfc2047 were sometimes not decoded.</li>
<li>Recoll dumps core when exiting if the configuration was not found.</li>
<li>The Qt4 version sometimes did not display the status bar in the main
window.</li>
<li>Message boundaries were not detected inside mbox format files with quoted
strings inside the 'From ' lines. (ie [From "Smith, John" ...]).</li>
<li>The Term Explorer GUI dialog was not created at all if aspell was not
compiled int (leaving no access to wildcard, regexp and stemming
expansions).</li>
<li>Give priority to the user's PATH when looking for qmake (fixes detecting
the wrong qmake when more than one exists).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_2">1.12.2</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>The sort tool does not work with qt3 (at least some versions), the Apply
button does nothing.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_1">1.12.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Uncatched Xapian exceptions can crash the GUI when a query is run while
the index is being updated.</li>
<li>The result list right-click pop up menu does not appear when the cursor
is inside a table.</li>
<li>Multithreaded access to Xlib can crash the real-time indexer.</li>
<li>A looping filter (ie: rclps trying to index loop.ps) can keep on running
forever and stop the indexing while eating cpu.</li>
<li>Filter subprocesses can sometimes be left around after indexing is
interrupted. Two signals are sometimes necessary to get recollindex to
exit.</li>
<li>Signals SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 are not blocked.</li>
<li>Sort does not work on queries started from the command line.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_0">1.12.0</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>To compile the Python interface for recoll 1.12, you need to edit
setup.py and replace "rcldb/pathhash.cpp" with "utils/fileudi.cpp".</li>
<li>rclman outputs control characters, causing problems with preview and
phrase searches in manual pages.</li>
<li>rcllyx has trouble with 8bit characters in file names.</li>
<li>"recoll -q ..." processes incorrectly second and further command line
arguments.</li>
<li><a name="XapianNearPatch">The</a> following problem was corrected by
Xapian 1.0.11 or 1.0.12, and I can see no reason to use older versions
and/or the patches below. However, they're kept around in case someone
needs them.<br>
NEAR expansion errors: recoll performs stemming expansion inside NEAR
clauses (except if prevented by a capitalized entry). Because of a Xapian
bug (up to 1.0.12 (or 11?)), NEAR does not support multiple OR subclauses.
This manifests itself by a 'not implemented' Xapian exception or an
explicit error message. Workarounds:
<ul>
<li>Prevent expansion of NEAR terms (possibly except one) by capitalizing
them. </li>
<li>Or apply the following patch to xapian, inside the "api/"
directory:<br>
0.x versions: <a
href="xapian/xapNearDistrib-0.x.patch">xapian/xapNearDistrib-0.x.patch</a>
<br>
1.0.[0-9]: <a
href="xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.0_9.patch">xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.0_9.patch</a>
<br>
1.0.10: <a
href="xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.10.patch">xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.10.patch</a>
<br>
or fetch the already patched source from <a href="xapian/">the local
xapian/ directory</a> then recompile, and install. </li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_11_4">1.11.4</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).</li>
<li>Incorrect handling of "accents" inside Japanese katakana text.</li>
<li>Using the "Erase history" command on an empty history would cause recoll
to crash.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_11_1">1.11.1</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Unicode space characters like <em>0x3000,�Ideographic�space</em> where
not detected inside user entries like the main interface search entry.
Badly parsed searches would retrieve no results, when the same search
entered with ascii space characters would have succeeded.</li>
<li>Spaces were inserted inside CJK strings when building abstracts for the
result list.</li>
<li>Accent removal should not be performed for Japanese.</li>
<li>When using the query language, an OR part with more than two terms will
swallow preceding AND terms, one for each additional OR. Ex: (champagne
ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx) will be interpreted as "champagne OR ext:odt
OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx" instead of the correct "champagne AND (ext:odt OR
ext:sxw OR ext:lyx)" Workaround until the fix is issued: add non-existing
terms before the OR part and check the resulting query: "champagne
bogusxyztv ext:odt OR ext:sxw OR ext:lyx" </li>
<li>The "Copy file name" and "Copy URL" entries of the right-click menus only
copy the data to the X11 primary selection (use middle-button click to
paste). This is probably a mistake, the data should be copied to the
clipboard too (permitting the use of the "Paste" edit menu entry or Ctrl+V
in the target).</li>
<li>Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).</li>
</ul>
<h2>1.10.6</h2>
<ul>
<li>If the locale is not utf-8, non-ascii command line arguments to recoll
and recollq are not converted to utf-8, which may prevent, for example, the
kde applet from working. The workaround is to apply the following one-line
fix to qtgui/main.cpp, recompile and install recoll:
<pre> 386c386
< sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromUtf8(qstring.c_str()));
---
> sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromLocal8Bit(qstring.c_str()));
</pre>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>1.10.1</h2>
<ul>
<li>A relatively simple error case can cause the indexer to stop processing
an mbox file (forgetting all subsequent messages). More specifically, this
happens when encountering more than than a few dozen errors while handling
attachments. This is relatively common: for exemple if an external helper
application is missing and multiple attachments of the affected type are
found (ie: multiple images and no exiftool). Workaround: install the helper
application. </li>
<li>The decoding of base-64 data in emails fails in a relatively uncommon but
sometimes encountered case. </li>
<li>In a preview window, when walking the search term hits with the
Previous/Next buttons, 'Previous' actually acts as 'Next' (it does work
normally for the local search). </li>
<li>Problems in detecting message separators inside Thunderbird mailboxes
(quite probably mainly for messages imported from outlook?). Can lead to
unindexed messages, and even apparently indexer crashes in some cases. </li>
<li>File names indexed as terms can sometimes overflow the maximum term size,
halting the indexing. </li>
<li>For Phrase/Near searches, only the first term group is highlighted in
preview. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.10.0</h2>
<ul>
<li>If a filter fails while trying to extract the data from a file, the file
will not be indexed at all (not even the file name). The file name should
be indexed in this case. This happens in particular in the very common case
where the helper application is not installed (ie: missing Exiftool ->
no *.jpg names in the index). </li>
<li>If several query language "ext:" qualifiers are specified, they will be
joined by an AND instead of OR, resulting in no results. Using an explicit
OR doesn't work (actually OR + field names is generally broken). In some
cases, you can use a "type:" qualifier as a workaround. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.9.x</h2>
<ul>
<li>Problems have been reported indexing big mailstores (several hundreds of
thousands of messages): resulting in a very big database and even crashes.
</li>
</ul>
<h2>1.8.2</h2>
<ul>
<li>Under ubuntu (at least, maybe debian too), the default awk interpreter
(mawk) is ancient, and the recoll pdf input filter does not work (removes
all space characters). This can be solved by installing the gawk package. $
apt-get install gawk $ update-alternatives --set awk /usr/bin/gawk </li>
<li>There are sometimes problems with document deletions: the index can get
in a state where deleted or moved documents are not purged from the index
(the log file says that the doc are deleted, but they aren't actually).
When this happens, the only solution currently is to reindex from scratch
(recollindex -z). This is due to a xapian bug, which is fixed in xapian
1.0.2, or you can apply the following patch to xapian 1.0.1 to fix it:
http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/xapian/xapian-delete-document.patch
</li>
<li>The dates shown for email attachments in a result list are the email
folder modification date. This should be inherited from the parent message
instead. </li>
<li>There are a few problems in the qt4 version of recoll: </li>
<li>Some accelerators (esc-spc, ctl-arrow) do not work, neither do copy/paste
between the result list and preview windows and x11 applications. </li>
<li>The qt4 q3textedit::find() method is extremely slow, so that positionning
to first search term in Recoll preview has been disabled, and the
application will sometimes appear to be looping when using the find feature
in the preview window (it's not looping, it's searching...) </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.8.1</h2>
<ul>
<li>This is not really a bug but .beagle really should be included in
"skippedNames", or you end up indexing the beagle text cache, which is not
really desirable. </li>
<li>Doc bug: the manual states that the query language supports a "mime:"
switch to filter mime types. There is currently no such thing. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.7.5</h2>
<ul>
<li>Debian and Ubuntu: the rclsoff Openoffice filter doesn't work, because of
an incorrect shell syntax (understood by bash but not sh). To fix, you edit
/usr[/local]/share/recoll/filters/rclsoff and can change the line: trap
cleanup EXIT SIGHUP SIGQUIT SIGINT SIGTERM into: trap cleanup EXIT HUP QUIT
INT TERM or download the updated filter from the filters page:
http://www.recoll.org/filters/filters.html </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.7.3</h2>
<ul>
<li>Processing will stop on first error while indexing an mbox file. This
could happen just because an attachment could not be decoded, and can cause
non-indexing of many messages. The most probable cause of error is a
missing filter (ie for ms-word files), so the temporary workaround would be
to install the missing filters. This bug is specific to 1.7 and 1.6 users
need not worry. A correction will be issued very soon. </li>
<li>Messages of type multipart/signed are not indexed. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.6.2</h2>
<ul>
<li>Relatively unfrequent issue with message boundary detection in mbox
files, could cause miscellaneous problems. </li>
<li>Executing an external viewer for a file with single-quotes in the name
would not work. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.5.10</h2>
<ul>
<li>If a defaultcharset was set in the configuration file for a subdirectory,
it would stay in effect for all subsequent files/directories (except if
explicitely overridden), potentially causing many transcoding errors. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.5.[1-7]</h2>
<ul>
<li>Dates in result list come from the file's ctimes, which may be confusing
</li>
<li>Some rare MIME messages with null boundaries can crash the indexer. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.5.0</h2>
<ul>
<li>Under some conditions, recoll startup and exit could be very slow: the
simple search history list had serious problems with non-ascii strings,
whose size sometimes doubled at each program startup/stop. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.3.3</h2>
<ul>
<li>Several of the external filters did not handle path names with embedded
spaces (rcluncomp rclsoff rclps rclmedia rcldjvu). This is fixed in 1.4.
</li>
<li>If your QT installation is built with the QT_NO_STL flag, Recoll will not
compile. I have a patch for this (will be fixed in the next release),
contact me if you get the problem. Typical error message: main.cpp:160:
error: no match for 'operator+=' in 'msg += reason' </li>
<li>The 'None of these words' field in the complex search does not work if
there are no other filled fields (it transforms into an ordinary search).
Workaround: enter very common term(s) in the 'any of these words' field.
</li>
<li>Indexing cannot currently be conveniently and cleanly stopped when it's
started. You can kill the process, and keyboard interrupt might work, but
this may leave the database in a bad state. This is fixed in the upcoming
release, there is no current workaround. </li>
</ul>
<h2>1.2.2</h2>
<ul>
<li>The preview window is supposed to scroll after loading the document so
that the first search term is visible. This does not work in many cases.
</li>
<li>The result list title is not shown for sorted lists Notes on older
versions: </li>
<li>Trouble compiling on some linux systems (Gentoo and Slackware?). There
existed a quite common issue where the Recoll link will fail trying to use
a libstdc++.la file. This was due to a problem with the xapian-config
program. A workaround has been included in the configure script for recoll
1.2.2, and the problem should not occur any more. </li>
<li>Case-insensitive search should now work in most cases (used to not work
except for accented ascii). </li>
<li>All directories and files with names beginning with a dot were ignored by
the skippedNames directive in the default recoll.conf file from older
versions (no indexing of mozilla or thunderbird email !). An upgrade will
not fix this (it will not modify an existing configuration). You need to
edit recoll.conf by hand and remove the .* from skippedNames.</li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>