Xapian 1.4.27 released

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2024 at 05:31:11PM +1300, Olly Betts wrote:
> Xapian 1.4.27 can now be downloaded from:
> 
> https://xapian.org/download

I thought I should flag up an issue with 1.4.27.

Xapian has automatically enabled Large File Support (LFS) for a long
time (since 2002 in xapian-core; since 2010 in xapian-omega).

However, due to a bug in autoconf 2.72 large file support won't get
enabled on platforms where it isn't the default:

https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?110983

Modern 64-bit platforms all seem to have LFS on by default, but 32-bit
platforms mostly don't.  The upshot on affected platforms for
xapian-core is that databases with tables > 2GB won't work; while for
xapian-omega the filesize is unlikely to be a problem, but LFS needs to
be on to allow reading directory entries with 64-bit inode values - e.g.
you can get these from CIFS shares.

1.4.27 is the first release bootstrapped with autoconf 2.72 so this
problem doesn't affect older releases (unless you're running
`autoreconf` or equivalent yourself).  There's also a bug in
xapian-core's testsuite which causes it to fail to compile if `off_t` is
32-bit.

You can workaround the first problem by setting the appropriate options
by hand.  E.g. for 32-bit Linux:

  ./configure CPPFLAGS=-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
  
This will also avoid the second problem, unless you're on a platform
which *only* supports 32-bit `off_t` - in that case, you can apply the
patch from 

https://trac.xapian.org/changeset/355b49d9e0d15534e278e32ad42d9009e3a17b03/git

Omega is affected by the same autoconf bug as xapian-core, and the same
workaround can be used.

These issues are all addressed in git (both for master and the
RELEASE/1.4 branch). 

Cheers,
    Olly