[Xapian-discuss] Debs

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Tue Aug 12 05:57:50 BST 2008


> On Aug 11, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Amias Channer wrote:
> > Could anyone comment on when the etch debs are likely to appear for  
> > the new Xapian version ? Its still on 0.9.9-1 and i really want to
> > use the new version before getting stuck into serious work with
> > Xapian.

Debian don't generally update packages once a release has been made.
The exceptions are security bugs and other bugs which are sufficiently
serious that the risk of changing the code is far outweighed by the
risks of the bug itself.

If you find that policy too conservative, then perhaps Debian stable
isn't for you (not trying to knock Debian stable - if you want to
install something that works and will keep working for years without
much tinkering beyond security updates, it's a good choice, but the flip
side is that you get old versions of everything).  

There's a repository of "backported" newer versions of some packages
rebuilt for Debian stable available from backports.org.  This isn't
officially part of Debian, but is run by Debian developers, and its
status is tracked by some of the Debian infrastructure (such as
packages.debian.org and qa.debian.org).

On backports.org, you can find xapian-core 1.0.4 and
libsearch-xapian-perl 1.0.4.0.  They don't have xapian-omega or
xapian-bindings though, and 1.0.4 is a bit old.  I don't upload to there
myself as I'd need to get the uploads sponsored, and delay them until
the Debian uploads propagate to testing, which isn't an unreasonable
policy, but extends the release process for me by another 10 days.  If
someone is a Debian Developer and wants to take care of making uploads
for each new release, I certainly wouldn't be upset.

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 12:58:15PM +0200, Andreas Marienborg wrote:
> The newer versions are in xapian.org's own apt-repo. Instructions are  
> on the site:
> 
> http://xapian.org/download.php

And this is the easiest answer if you want the latest version of Xapian
for released versions of Debian or Ubuntu.

This now has the latest release (1.0.7) plus a couple of fixes taken
from SVN.  I noticed just now that "stable" and "unstable" weren't
linked correctly.  I've just fixed that, so if you were only seeing
older versions (1.0.5 probably) from the xapian.org repo, run "apt-get
update" or equivalent.

Cheers,
    Olly



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