Release Overview for 1.4.16

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.

C++ API

• MSet::snippet(): The snippet now includes trailing punctuation which carries meaning or gives useful context. See ​https://github.com/xapian/xapian/pull/180, reported by Robert Stepanek.

matcher

• Fix segfault in rare cases in the query optimiser. We keep a pointer to the most recent posting list to use as a hint for opening the next posting list, but the existing mechanism to take ownership of this hint had a flaw. We now invalidate the hint in situations where it might be indirectly deleted which is safe, but somewhat conservative.

documentation

• Fix missing menus in API documentation. Newer doxygen generates .js files which we also need to distribute and install.

Lua bindings

• Allow passing a Lua function as a MatchSpy. This was supposed to be supported already, but the typemaps weren't set up.

• On platforms where sizeof(long) is 4, SWIG was wrapping Xapian::BAD_VALUENO as a negative constant in Lua, which was then rejected by a check which disallows passing negative values for unsigned C++ types. We now direct SWIG to handle Xapian::valueno as double (which is what numbers in Lua usually actually are) which gives us an unsigned constant, and also eliminates the negative value check.

Perl

• Resolve the remaining issues and remove the "experimental" marker from the SWIG-generated Perl bindings.