Software Update: Xapian 0.9.4

The Xapian Project development team has released version 0.9.4 of Xapian. This program is an open source information retrieval library written in C++, and is used as the “engine” behind a search engine. It includes a proprietary database format, APIs to edit and search databases, tools to verify databases, and binding capabilities for other languages ​​such as Java, PHP, and Python. The list of changes since the last entry in the muck tracker looks like this:

Version 0.9.4:

• A fix for the xapian-config breakage in 0.9.3.
• Use of deprecated functions and methods now gives a warning (provided you’re using GCC 3.1 or later). The documentation comments for deprecated methods should now all indicate clearly how to update code to avoid using them – please do so as we’ll be removing deprecated methods later this year.
• xapian_revision() now works (the definition in the library had a typo in the function name in 0.9.3).
• Minor documentation updates.
• The bindings now wrap Stopper::get_description() and xapian_version_string() and related functions.
• The bindings should now automatically set MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET for compiling as well as configuring, where required.
• The PHP bindings should now build with a ZTS-enabled PHP (which is the default configuration on MS Windows).

Version 0.9.3:

• Assorted fixes for minor bugs and niggles
• A fix for compiling with GCC 4.0.1 or newer.
• Fixes for compiling on cygwin (which was broken by changes in 0.9.2).
• Out-of-the-box support for indexing OpenDocument format in Omega (previously you needed to set suitable mime-type mappings).
• Improved language selection in xapian-bindings configure (you now specify which languages ​​you want, not which you don’t).
• Greatly reduced compile-time and glue-library size for the SWIG-based bindings.
• Major improvements to the PHP bindings (wrapping of overloaded methods no longer requires a renamed variant for each overloaded form).
• The C# bindings are now usable!

Version 0.9.2:

• Assorted fixes minor bugs and niggles
• A usable version of the next-generation flint database backend (the test-harness in 0.9.1 was running tests on quartz for a second time when it should have been running them on flint, and flint had some pretty show-stopping bugs). The current version of flint is in use by the search on gmane.
• The QueryParser now optionally supports right-truncation (wildcard at the end of a term) and you can optionally allow boolean operators to be spelled in lower or mixed case.
• Sorting results by value is now supported by the remote backend.
• Omega now supports highlighting each word in a different color background (like Gmane and Google do).

[break]An application that can be used on top of Xapian is Omega, a search engine to search Xapian databases. Omega also includes some tools that can be used to populate databases with data. Because the development of Omega is closely linked to that of Xapian itself, new versions of both are released simultaneously with the same version number.

The following two files can be downloaded:
Xapian 0.9.4
Omega 0.9.4