Release Overview for 1.0.13

This page contains a high level description of the more notable changes made for release 1.0.13. 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 1.0.13.

API

• Xapian::Document no longer ever stores empty values explicitly. This wasn't intentional behaviour, and how this case was handled wasn't documented. The amended behaviour is consistent with how user metadata is handled. This change isn't observable using Document::get_value(), but can be noticed when iterating with Document::values_begin(), using Document::values_count(), or trying to delete the value with Document::remove_value().

matcher

• Several performance improvements.

scriptindex

• Add new "valuenumeric" action to add a document value using Xapian::sortable_serialise() to allow numeric sorting (#260).

Python

• Change the SWIG-generated wrapper code so it doesn't attempt to acquire Python's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in situations where we know that it will already be locked. This avoids some dead-locks with mod_python (due to mod_python bugs which are apparently unlikely to ever be fixed), and results in smaller wrappers which run a little faster (in tests with Xapian on x86-64 Ubuntu 9.04, the stripped wrapper library was 11% smaller and ran 2.7% faster). (#185)

Perl

• Add Search::Xapian::MSet::items() method which returns an array tied to the MSet (much like Search::Xapian::Enquire::matches(), but you get access to the MSet object itself).

• Add new translated version of the simple examples from the Python bindings, and so more fully featured examples: full-indexer.pl and full-searcher.pl.