Known bugs in current and older versions:
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.
Latest (recoll 1.10.6 + xapian 1.0.x):
- 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
- 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:
386c386
< sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromUtf8(qstring.c_str()));
---
> sSearch->setSearchString(QString::fromLocal8Bit(qstring.c_str()));
- 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.
- 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.
- NEAR crashes: 1.6 has added NEAR searches. Unlike what recoll did
with PHRASES, stemming expansion is performed on terms inside NEAR
clauses (except if prevented by a capitalized entry of course). There is
a bug in Xapian (all versions as far as I know), where NEAR does not support
multiple OR subclauses, as would result from a multiple expansion. This
manifests itself by a 'not implemented' Xapian exception. Workarounds:
- Prevent expansion of NEAR terms (possibly except one) by
capitalizing them.
- Or apply the following patch to xapian, inside the
"api/" directory:
http://www.recoll.org/xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.patch
or fetch the already patched source:
http://www.recoll.org/xapian/xapian-core-1.0.7-recollNEARpatch.tar.gz
then recompile, and install.
I hope that an equivalent fix will make it into xapian at some point (the
current fix is not completely correct but still handles most useful cases).
- 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).
- 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.
- Under Solaris, it is necessary to perform initial indexing with the
recollindex program (the recoll index thread doesn't work for creating
the database). Don't know the reason. Only idea I have is problem with
exception handling (recoll catches an exception while trying the
yet inexistant db).
1.10.1 + xapian 1.0.x
- 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.
- The decoding of base-64 data in emails fails in a relatively uncommon
but sometimes encountered case.
- 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).
- 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.
- File names indexed as terms can sometimes overflow the maximum term
size, halting the indexing.
- For Phrase/Near searches, only the first term group is highlighted in
preview.
1.10.0
- 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).
- 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.
1.9.x
- Problems have been reported indexing big mailstores (several hundreds of
thousands of messages): resulting in a very big database and even
crashes.
1.8.2
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- There are a few problems in the qt4 version of recoll:
- Some accelerators (esc-spc, ctl-arrow) do not work, neither do
copy/paste between the result list and preview windows and x11
applications.
- 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...)
1.8.1
- 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.
- Doc bug: the manual states that the query language supports a "mime:"
switch to filter mime types. There is currently no such thing.
***************************************************************************
1.7.5
- 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
1.7.3
- 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.
- Messages of type multipart/signed are not indexed.
1.6.2
- Relatively unfrequent issue with message boundary detection in mbox
files, could cause miscellaneous problems.
- Executing an external viewer for a file with single-quotes in the name
would not work.
1.5.10
- 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.
1.5.[1-7]
- Dates in result list come from the file's ctimes, which may be confusing
- Some rare MIME messages with null boundaries can crash the indexer.
1.5.0
- 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.
1.3.3
- Several of the external filters did not handle path names with embedded
spaces (rcluncomp rclsoff rclps rclmedia rcldjvu). This is fixed in 1.4.
- 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'
- 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.
- 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.
1.2.2
- 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.
- The result list title is not shown for sorted lists
Notes on older versions:
- 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.
- Case-insensitive search should now work in most cases (used to not work
except for accented ascii).
- 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 indexation 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.