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.

1.20-34 indexes are fully backward compatible. No need to reindex when upgrading.

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 1.34

  • Add option to complement queries having rare words with more common spelling approximations.

  • rclaudio: improve performance with NFS-mounted volumes in some cases. Support ID3 tags in WAV and AIFF files. Add dsf and dff support.

  • Mac: fix GUI Open trying to use "xdg-open": use MacOS "open" instead .

  • recollq: when displaying snippets for a group search, filter out non-matching snippets.

  • TeX: make a better attempt at guessing charset.

Minor releases at a glance

Note
 whisper speech to text translation is broken in 1.34.4 and 1.34.5.

  • 1.34.7

    • Fix handler max memory size limitation setting not working for values over 2GB.

    • Fix monitoring several symbolic links as topdirs would only work for the first one.

  • 1.34.6

    • Fix rclaudio whisper integration, broken in 1.34.4 and 1.34.5

  • 1.34.5

    • recollq: repair -A option, broken in 1.34.0

  • 1.34.4

    • GUI: add -W command line flag to start with a system tray icon only (no window open).

    • Data extraction: add flag allowing a handler to return the data as a file path pointer instead of in the stream.

    • Fix issue in the code for executing external command: could take a huge time and appear to loop on some environments (e.g. Docker running an Arch image), because of a very high value for the maximum number of file descriptors.

  • 1.34.3

    • Fix jupyter notebook indexing: only the code was extracted.

    • Add config line for text/x-rpm-spec and text/x-copying: COPYING and .spec files were not indexed.

    • Packaging: install the needed pyaspell python extension, renamed as recollaspell to avoid conflicts. pyaspell is not commonly packaged so we can’t have a depend. Actually makes it possible to use the automatic spelling expansion capability in the packaged version. It is not enabled by default, do it from the GUI search preferences.

    • rclaudio: add capability to run OpenAI whisper speech-to-text and index the result, which is also cached the same way as OCR data (immune to index resets and file moves). This is off by default and activated by setting parameters in recoll.conf, see the manual and https://www.recoll.org/faqsandhowtos/IndexAudioWhisper.html

    • Add a sample Python external indexer for indexing the Joplin notes database. See src/python/samples/rcljoplin.py, which has comments for configuration and setup at the top.

    • GUI: add option to show hit counts in completer popup.

    • Fix possible crash in the recoll Python extension in update mode.

  • 1.34.2

    • GUI: fix restable header click not initiating query.

    • PDF: if pdfoutline is set, extract TOC/bookmarks/outline as supplementary description.

    • Windows: fix the initial dialog which showed an error instead of proposing to configure then index.

    • Windows: improve the dir side filter list display.

    • Windows: fix crash in index config dialog for non-ascii user names.

    • MacOS: fix identification for file names without suffixes.

    • MacOS: fix issue with crontab usage.

  • 1.34.1

    • Small improvements in rclaudio.

    • PDF: optionally extract outline/bookmarks data (pdfoutline=1 in recoll.conf)

    • MacOS fix indexing for suffix-less files

    • Windows: improve the directory filtering side panel filter display.

    • Windows: fix crash from index configuration panel for users with non-ASCII logins (caused by webcache issue).