Installing over an older version and other notes

Note
 Ubuntu commands installed as snap packages can’t create arbitrary files under /tmp. This is for example the case by default for pdftk which is used by Recoll to extract PDF attachments. For best results, set TMPDIR to a location which belongs to you (e.g. inside your home, with something like export TMPDIR=~/tmp in your shell startup script). Recoll could conceivably work around the problem all by itself, but I find it in bad taste to create temporary files in an arbitrary location inside your home.

1.20-28 indexes are fully backward compatible. No need to reindex when upgrading.

New index format with Xapian 1.4: the default on-disk format of Xapian 1.4 (glass) has changed to improve the performance of phrase searches. This had the infortunate consequence of rendering the Recoll snippets generation method excessively slow except for very small indexes. In consequence, new indexes created by Recoll 1.24/26 using Xapian 1.4 have a different format and store the document texts inside the index. No specific action is required from the user, except if you have and old index and want to use the new format (nicer snippets, faster phrase searches), in which case you should delete the old index (see next).

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (e.g.: you’re not sure it’s at least 1.18). The best method is to quit all Recoll programs and 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).

On Windows, the index is located by default in C:/Users/[me]/AppData/Local/Recoll/xapiandb

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

Changes in Recoll 1.28

  • New options to hide most GUI elements except the result area and the simple search entry.

  • Reorganized menus.

  • Add preference for separate indexing log file.

  • Miscellanous fixes and improvements:

    • Fix CJK indexing in the specific case of encountering numeric after CJK punctuation.

    • Use py7zr in preference to pylzma for 7z archive indexing

    • Increase query slice size from 50 to 100 for better performance.

    • Process emacs org-mode files.

    • Fix bug in mail header processing.

    • Python extension: improve the Python Doc object.

Minor releases at a glance

  • 1.28.6

    • Add rclorgmode.py forgotten in 1.28.5

  • 1.28.5

    • Fix broken indexing of RTF files masquerading as .doc.

    • Fix near/phrase searches for multiword synonyms (needs config).

  • 1.28.3

    • Fix an issue in Python extension: Doc attribute setting not working. This had very little impact as regular clients like the WebUI or the GSSP do not modify the Doc objects (it did impact the upmpdcli Media Server).

  • 1.28.2

    • GUI: prevent vertical stretching of category buttons frame.

  • 1.28.1

    • Fix build error in kioslave.