Installing over an older version and other notes

Note
 Ubuntu commands installed as snap packages can’t create arbitrary files under /tmp. If some of the external commands used for indexing are snaps, 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 to 1.44 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/[yourlogin]/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 1.44.0

  • Archive handlers (zip, rar, 7z, tar): improve performance by avoiding computing the name list repeatedly, which was extremely inefficient and could cause an order of magnitude slowdown on, e.g., zip files with a high member count.

  • Python extension: add Db.getEnclosing(doc), Db.hasSubDocs(doc), Db.getSubDocs(doc) and Query.getfirstmatchpage() methods.

  • Mbox handler: modified to allow working from memory: avoids creating a temporary file for, e.g., a zipped mbox.

  • krunner: add action to show the result inside its parent folder.

  • Fix (benign in most cases) memory leak during queries when simplifying the tree, the pruned subtree was not deleted.

  • Windows: fix unrtf (RTF text extractor), which had been broken in late releases.

Minor releases at a glance

  • 1.44.1

    • Fixed several errors in Snippets selection and sorting. Esp. snippets with group matches were sometimes wrongly discarded.

    • Python API: incompatible change: in the rarely (possibly never) used SearchData-based part of the API the test for an 'OR' request was reversed. With an unspecified type parameters, queries defaulted to AND and still do. If the type was specified, OR was used except if the parameter value was "or" or "OR" in which case an AND query was generated. The fix breaks older code setting the parameter.

    • PPT: fixed issue in the old .ppt (not pptx) handler preventing access to part of the document data (Error: PropertySetStream object has no attribute getDirectoryStreamByName' message).

    • Windows: the new antiword version can now process very small word docs (which previously caused a "too small to handle" error message). Of course the fix is also available from the antiword repository on framagit if you want to build from source on Linux or Mac OS.