recoll/website/BUGS.txt

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. 

Latest (recoll 1.10.2 + xapian 1.0.x):

- 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).

- 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.

- NEAR crashes: 1.6 has added NEAR searches. Unlike what recoll did
  with PHRASES, stemming expansion is performed on terms inside NEAR
  clauses (except if prevented by a capitalized entry of course). There is
  a bug in Xapian (all versions as far as I know), where NEAR does not support
  multiple OR subclauses, as would result from a multiple expansion. This
  manifests itself by a 'not implemented' Xapian exception. Workarounds:

      - Prevent expansion of NEAR terms (possibly except one) by
        capitalizing them.

      - Or apply the following patch to xapian, inside the
        "api/" directory: 
         http://www.recoll.org/xapian/xapNearDistrib-1.0.patch
        or fetch the already patched source:
	 http://www.recoll.org/xapian/xapian-core-1.0.5-recollNEARpatch.tar.gz

        then recompile, and install.

  I hope that an equivalent fix will make it into xapian at some point (the
  current fix is not completely correct but still handles most useful cases).

- 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).

- 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.

- 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.

- Under Solaris, it is necessary to perform initial indexing with the
  recollindex program (the recoll index thread doesn't work for creating
  the database). Don't know the reason. Only idea I have is problem with
  exception handling (recoll catches an exception while trying the
  yet inexistant db).

1.10.1 + xapian 1.0.x

- The decoding of base-64 data in emails fails in a relatively uncommon but
  sometimes encountered case.
- The "Previous" button in the preview window would actually go forward
  when walking the search terms 

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 indexation 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.