Release notes for Recoll 1.19.x

Caveats

Installing over an older version: 1.19

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

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (you're not sure it's 1.18). The simplest way to do this is to quit all recoll programs and just 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).

Viewer exceptions: There is a new list of mime types that should be opened with the locally configured application even when Use Desktop Preferences is checked. This allows making use of new functions (direct access to page), which could not be available through the desktop's xdg-open. The default list contains PDF, Postscript and DVI, which should be opened with the evince (or atril for Mint/MATE users) viewer for the page access functions to work. If you want to keep the previous behaviour (losing the page number functionality), you need to prune the list after installation . This can be done from the Preferences->Gui Configuration menu.

Changes

Recoll 1.19 .... Changes documented from 1.18.1 to rev 3159

• Changed format for rclaptg field. Was colon-separated, now uses normal value/attributes syntax with an empty value like:

              localfields = ; attr1 = val1 ; attr2 = val2
            

• There are new GUI configuration options to run in "search as you type" mode, and to disable the Qt auto-completion inside the simple search string, which was often more confusing and ennoying than useful.
• The software can now be built so that indexing is runs with multiple threads. This can be a major performance boost for people with multiprocessor machines and big indexes. It is not enabled by default for now, you will need to build from source. I wrote some notes about the transformation and the performance improvements.
• The Python module has been expanded to include the interface for extracting data. This means that you could now write most of the Recoll GUI in Python if you wished. There is a bit of sample code in the source package doing just this. A few incompatible changes had to be made to the Python module. Especially the "Query.next" field is gone and the module structure has been changed (different import statement needed). Adapting your code is trivial, have a look at the changes in the Unity Lens module for an example. The new module is compatible with the Python Database API Specification v2.0 for the parts that make sense for a non-relational DB.
• You can now access your Recoll indexes through a Web browser interface. The server side is based on the Bottle Python Web frameork and the Recoll Python module, and can run self-contained (no necessity to run apache or another web server), so it's quite simple to set up. See: the expanded Python module. See the Recoll WebUI on GitHub.
• Recoll now uses a dynamic library for the code shared by the query interface, the indexer and the Python module. This should have no visible impact but was rendered necessary by the Python module evolutions.
• Fixed bugs: