Release Overview for 1.4.15

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

• ​xapian-core
• ​omega
• ​xapian-bindings

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

matcher

• Hoist positional check above OP_FILTER.

• Handle OP_FILTER with more than two subqueries correctly. Previously we'd only check the first two subqueries in some situations.

remote backend

• For a remote WritableDatabase, the client now keeps track of whether there are pending changes, and if there aren't then we now do nothing for commit() or cancel() calls. In particular this saves a message exchange when the WritableDatabase destructor is called when changes have already been committed with an explicit call to commit() (which is what we recommend doing, since with an explicit call to commit() you get to see any exception which gets thrown).

• When closing a remote prog WritableDatabase, previously an exception could leave the remote connection open with the remote server running, and we'd then wait for the specified timeout before closing the connection. Now we close the connection before letting the exception propagate.

• Don't swallow exceptions from Database::close() on a remote database. If we aren't in a transaction and so try to commit() and that fails then previously the caller would have no indication of the failure.

Omega indexers

• Check for a BOM on HTML files, which for HTML5 should determine the encoding.

OmegaScript

• Allow $if{COND} without any actions which is useful as a way to evaluate something but ignore the result if you just want the side effects. Indeed we were already recommending to use it if you want to ignore the return value of $log. Fixes bug introduced in 1.4.14, reported by tuftedocelot.

• Add $jsonbool{COND} for encoding a boolean value for use in JSON. This is equivalent to $if{COND,true,false} but more readable.

• Add $jsonobject{} which allows producing a JSON object from an OmegaScript map.

• Allow specifying a format to $jsonarray{} so it is no longer restricted to producing an array of strings.

• Add $keys{MAP} which gives a sorted list of the keys from an OmegaScript map.

Ruby bindings

• Ruby 2.7 is now supported.