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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.
recoll 1.16.2
* It will sometimes happen that the result list paragraph format stored
in the Qt preferences file will get garbled, causing result lists with
no displayed paragraphs (the counts and pages are ok, the results can
be seen in table mode, but not in list mode). The workaround is to go
to
Preferences->Query configuration->User interface
and erase the result paragraph format string (^A DEL in the text
area), this will reset the string to the default value.
* Real time indexer: when running with gamin on FreeBSD, the indexer can
deadlock in the gamin dialog in some cases.
* Real time indexer: file move events are not detected when running with
inotify (at least for recent versions). Workaround: restart indexer
from time to time.
* Real time indexer: directory moves are not handled at all. Workaround:
restart indexer from time to time.
* Cancelling a preview in the GUI will also cancel the indexing thread
if it is running.
* 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.
* 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).
recoll 1.16.1
* At least on OpenSUSE 12.1 / Qt 4.7.4 (and probably other
environments), the links to Preview or Open inside the result list do
not work. Also the GUI can crash if a temporary directory creation
fails.
* The Python filters can crash under certain error conditions. This is a
benign error, affecting just the current document, but it causes
system reports.
* The query is run 2 times, in most cases. This does not cause a too
dramatic performance impact because of caching but still...
* The output from some filters (most typically text files out from the
zip filters) is sometimes not transcoded correctly to UTF-8, causing
myriads of error messages (and a possible application crash due to
another bug in the unac code, described further).
* There is a compilation issue on Linux systems with a 3.x kernel.
* Queries without search terms (ie: all files of a given mime type) fail
with an "empty query" diagnostic.
* The recollq command line query program sometimes does not clean up its
temporary directory.
* Indexing can crash on files with weird names (inconsistent with the
locale) for which the format of the "file -i" command is unexpected.
This is probably dependant on the type of system and/or locale.
Workaround: arrange for the offending file not to be indexed (move it
away or configure it out), or apply this patch, which should work with
all versions from 1.13 to 1.16.1
* Under certain conditions, the indexer can use all available memory and
crash. This is caused by a memory leak in an error handling path
inside unac, and can only be triggered in specific conditions (all
cases seen were from files inside zip archives). Workaround: arrange
for the offending file not to be indexed (move it away or configure it
out), or apply this patch, which should work with all versions from
1.13 to 1.16.1
* The lyx filter does not correctly detect the Lyx version, needed for
correct indexing.
* A typo in a memory reallocation call inside the firefox web history
indexing module may cause problems in a highly improbable case.
* Directory creations are not processed by the real time indexer (for
indexing directory names).
recoll 1.16.0
* The recoll GUI program sometimes crashes when running a query while
the indexing thread is active. Possible workarounds:
* Upgrade to 1.16.1
* Use the command line recollindex program to perform indexing
(usually just type "recollindex" in a console, or see "man
recollindex").
* Do not run queries in recoll while the indexing thread is running
(as indicated in the bottom status line).
recoll 1.15.7
* 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:
I'm afraid the text stream of this file is too small to handle.
Only small files produced by Microsoft Word on a Mac, or by OpenOffice
will trigger this message.
Workaround: 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. This fix was made
the default in 1.16
* Compressed man pages could not be previewed.
* Sorting by document and file size in the result table does not work.
* idxflushmb was not handled while deleting documents in the index,
leading to almost unbounded memory usage.
* Email messages for which there would be an error indexing an
attachment would not be indexed at all.
* 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 ~/.recoll/xapiandb/)
and restart indexing. For big indexes, to avoid losing time, removing
the directory preventively may be preferable .
* Text files bigger than 2 GB can not be indexed.
* 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.
* Real time indexer: uncontrolled concurrent access to the global
configuration can cause a startup crash (mostly of big file trees
because of timing issues).
* 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.
* The GUI preview function sometimes fails with a non-sensical message
about a non-related missing helper.
* Most operations on the parent document in the result table view are
not connected and do nothing.
* 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.
* The GUI option to remember sort state between invocations only works
for sort by date.
* The rclzip filter can't handle utf-8 in path names for archive
members. An updated filter is available.
* 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 patch which fixes the issue (then needs
full reindex for these files).
* The ignored suffixes list (recoll_noindex) is itself ignored in some
cases.
* The man filter creates groff temporary png files in the home
directory.
* Indexing can hang or crash after an error occurs on an archive member
(which should have affected only the relevant document).
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* The result table row height is not adjusted according to default font
size, and the vertical position of text in cells is often bad.
recoll 1.15.5
* The Python and PHP modules in 1.15.5 have compile errors. This is solved
by this simple change.
* The current stemming language is not indicated by menu checkboxes.
recoll 1.15.2
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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).
* indexing script for xml formats (ie: svg) sometimes stall for 30 S
while xsltproc tries to access remote dtds.
* 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!
recoll 1.14.4
* rclmon.sh stop would not work.
* Some shell, awk, and perl scripts are not indexed. There is a simple
configuration tweak workaround
* The tree walk in indexing could loop on symbolic links.
* 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.
recoll 1.14.3
* Email message preview is broken.
* The new mutagen-based audio tags filter (rclaudio) only works with very
recent mutagen versions. See here for a corrected version.
recoll 1.14.1
* Compressed file view fix broke help viewer.
recoll 1.14.0
* Does not compile with Xapian 1.2. Apply patch.
* 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.
recoll 1.13.04
Note: 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.
* 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).
* Mac OS X + Qt 4.6.1 : the index configuration dialog crashes. Fixed with
Qt 4.7.
* 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).
* It seems that the recoll program sometimes segfaults when exiting after
the first execution ?
* 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)
* 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.
recoll 1.13.02
* 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.
* Fix the lyx filter to properly handle embedded white space in file
paths.
recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16
* 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:
#if QT_VERSION == 0x040601
to
#if QT_VERSION >= 0x040601
recoll 1.13.01 + xapian 1.0.16
* The field value was ignored in field searches for phrases or capitalized
words (ie: author:John or title:"the title").
* The GUI would sometimes crash during the first execution, after the
dialog about starting configuration.
* kio-recoll was not fully updated for 1.13 internals.
* Would not compile on Solaris 8.
1.12.4
* 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).
1.12.3
* 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.
* Killing recollindex sometimes left filter processes sleeping around.
* 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.
* Non-ascii characters in path names did not work well from the
configuration GUI (editing the configuration files did work).
* Accented characters in mail headers encoded according to a lax
interpretation of rfc2047 were sometimes not decoded.
* Recoll dumps core when exiting if the configuration was not found.
* The Qt4 version sometimes did not display the status bar in the main
window.
* Message boundaries were not detected inside mbox format files with
quoted strings inside the 'From ' lines. (ie [From "Smith, John" ...]).
* 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).
* Give priority to the user's PATH when looking for qmake (fixes detecting
the wrong qmake when more than one exists).
1.12.2
* The sort tool does not work with qt3 (at least some versions), the Apply
button does nothing.
1.12.1
* Uncatched Xapian exceptions can crash the GUI when a query is run while
the index is being updated.
* The result list right-click pop up menu does not appear when the cursor
is inside a table.
* Multithreaded access to Xlib can crash the real-time indexer.
* A looping filter (ie: rclps trying to index loop.ps) can keep on running
forever and stop the indexing while eating cpu.
* Filter subprocesses can sometimes be left around after indexing is
interrupted. Two signals are sometimes necessary to get recollindex to
exit.
* Signals SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 are not blocked.
* Sort does not work on queries started from the command line.
1.12.0
* To compile the Python interface for recoll 1.12, you need to edit
setup.py and replace "rcldb/pathhash.cpp" with "utils/fileudi.cpp".
* rclman outputs control characters, causing problems with preview and
phrase searches in manual pages.
* rcllyx has trouble with 8bit characters in file names.
* "recoll -q ..." processes incorrectly second and further command
line arguments.
* The 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.
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:
* Prevent expansion of NEAR terms (possibly except one) by
capitalizing them.
* Or apply the following patch to xapian, inside the "api/"
directory:
0.x versions: xapian/xapNearDistrib-0.x.patch
1.0.[0-9]: xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.0_9.patch
1.0.10: xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.10.patch
or fetch the already patched source from the local xapian/
directory then recompile, and install.
1.11.4
* Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).
* Incorrect handling of "accents" inside Japanese katakana text.
* Using the "Erase history" command on an empty history would cause
recoll to crash.
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.
* Accent removal should not be performed for Japanese.
* 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"
* 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).
* Possibly harmful bug in strerror_r usage (GNU case).
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 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.