Software Update: Xapian / Omega 1.0.14

Xapian is an open source information retrieval library written in C++ that can be used as an engine behind a search engine. It includes a proprietary database format, APIs to edit and search these databases, tools to check the databases, and linking capabilities for other languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Omega is an application that can be used as a search engine to search Xapian databases. Omega also includes some tools that can be used to populate databases with data. The development team at The Xapian Project has released version 1.0.14 of Xapian and Omega with the following announcement:

Release Overview for 1.0.14

This page contains a high level description of the more notable changes made for release 1.0.14. For full details of user-visible changes, see the NEWS files in each module:

• xapian core
• omega
• xapian bindings
• Search::Xapian

See also the full list of bug reports marked as fixed in 1.0.14.

Xapian-core Test Suite:

• Several issues which caused tests to fail spuriously or on certain platforms have been fixed.
• The output on test failure has been improved in some cases.

Flint Backend:

• Use F_FULLFSYNC where available (Mac OS X currently) to ensure that changes have been committed to disk. (ticket#288)

Remote Backend:

• Fix handling of percentage weights in various cases when we’re searching multiple remote databases or a mix of local and remote databases.

Build System:

• Change how snowball generates the data used by its among operation – instead of using pointers to the strings in struct among, store an offset into a constant pool, as this reduces the number of relocations by about 2300, which should decrease the time taken by the dynamic linker when loading the library. This also reduces the size of the shared library significantly (on x86-64 Linux, the stripped shared library is 4% smaller).

Omega:

• Avoid infinite loop in omindex and scriptindex when reading files under Cygwin with automatic end of line translation enabled. This same bug can also manifest on Unix platforms if the file is truncated by another process while being read.

perl:

• Add handling of C++ exceptions from methods of Document (ticket#284).