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<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 1.15</a></h2>
<ul>
<li>Cancelling a preview in the GUI will also cancel the indexing
thread if it is running.</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>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>
<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>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>
<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.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="b_1_15_7">recoll 1.15.7</a></h2>
<ul>
<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>
<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>
<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>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</h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_1">recoll 1.14.1</h2>
<li>Compressed file view fix broke help viewer.</li>
<h2><a name="b_1_14_0">recoll 1.14.0</h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_04">recoll 1.13.04</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>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_02">recoll 1.13.02</h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_01">recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16</a></h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_13_00">recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16</a></h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_4">1.12.4</a></h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_3">1.12.3</a></h2>
<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>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_2">1.12.2</a></h2>
<li>The sort tool does not work with qt3 (at least some
versions), the Apply button does nothing.</li>
<h2><a name="b_1_12_1">1.12.1</a></h2>
<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>
<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>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> The decoding of base-64 data in emails fails in a relatively uncommon
but sometimes encountered case.
<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> 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> File names indexed as terms can sometimes overflow the maximum term
size, halting the indexing.
<li> For Phrase/Near searches, only the first term group is highlighted in
preview.
</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> 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.
</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.
</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> 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> 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> There are a few problems in the qt4 version of recoll:
<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> 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...)
</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> Doc bug: the manual states that the query language supports a "mime:"
switch to filter mime types. There is currently no such thing.
</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
</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> Messages of type multipart/signed are not indexed.
</ul>
<h2>1.6.2</h2>
<ul>
<li> Relatively unfrequent issue with message boundary detection in mbox
files, could cause miscellaneous problems.
<li> Executing an external viewer for a file with single-quotes in the name
would not work.
</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.
</ul>
<h2>1.5.[1-7]</h2>
<ul>
<li> Dates in result list come from the file's ctimes, which may be confusing
<li> Some rare MIME messages with null boundaries can crash the indexer.
</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.
</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> 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> 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> 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.
</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> The result list title is not shown for sorted lists
Notes on older versions:
<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> Case-insensitive search should now work in most cases
(used to not work except for accented ascii).
<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>
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