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 1.11.2 + xapian 1.0.x)

• Performing a full index with release 1.11, 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 ~/.recoll/xapiandb/) and restart indexing. For big indexes, removing the directory preventively may be a smart move to avoid losing time.
• 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 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.
• 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).
• 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).

1.11.1

• Unicode space characters like 0x3000, Ideographic space 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.
• Spaces were inserted inside CJK strings when building abstracts for the result list.

1.10.6

• 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()));
  	  

1.10.1

• 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.