EVOLUTION-MANAGER

Edit File: HACKING

Instructions for hacking on Xapian ================================== .. contents:: Table of contents This file is aimed to help developers get started with working on Xapian. The documentation contains a section covering various internal aspects of the library - this can also be found on the Xapian website <http://xapian.org/>. Extra options to give to configure ================================== Note: Non-developer configure options are described in INSTALL You will probably want to use some of these if you're going to be developing Xapian. --enable-assertions This enables compiling of assertion code which will throw Xapian::AssertionError if the code detects violating of preconditions, postconditions, or fails other consistency checks. --enable-assertions=partial This option enables a subset of the assertions enabled by "--enable-assertions", but not the most expensive. The intention is that it should be suitable for use in a real-world system for tracking down problems without imposing too much of an overhead (but note that we haven't yet performed timings to measure the overhead...) --enable-log This enables compiling code into the library which generates verbose debugging messages. See "Debugging Messages", below. --enable-log=profile In 1.2.0 and earlier, this used to use the debug logging macros to report to stderr how long each method takes to execute. This feature was removed in 1.2.1 - you are likely to get better results using dedicated profiling tools - for more information see: http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProfilingXapian --enable-maintainer-mode This tells configure to enable make dependencies for regenerating build system files (such as configure, Makefile.in, and Makefile) and other generated files (such as the stemmers and query parser) when required. These are disabled by default as some make programs try to rebuild them when it's not appropriate (e.g. BSD make doesn't handle VPATH except for implicit rules). For this reason, we recommend GNU make if you enable maintainer mode. You'll also need a non-cross-compiling C compiler for compiling the Lemon parser generator and the Snowball stemming algorithm compiler. The configure script will attempt to locate one, but you can override this autodetection by passing CC_FOR_BUILD on the command line like so:: ./configure CC_FOR_BUILD=/opt/bin/gcc --enable-documentation This tells configure to enable make dependencies for regenerating documentation files. By default it uses the same setting as --enable-maintainer-mode. Debugging Messages ================== If you configure with --enable-log, lots of places in the code generate debugging messages to tell us what they're up to - this information can be very useful for debugging both the Xapian library and code which uses it. But the quantity of information generated is potentially vast so there's a mechanism to allow you to select where to store the log and which types of message you're interested by setting environment variables. You can: * set XAPIAN_DEBUG_LOG to be the path to a file that you would like debugging output to be appended to, or to the special value ``-`` to indicate that you would like debugging output to be sent to stderr. Unless XAPIAN_DEBUG_LOG is set, no debug logging will be performed. Occurrences of %p in XAPIAN_DEBUG_LOG will be replaced with the current process-id. * set XAPIAN_DEBUG_FLAGS to a string of capital letters indicating the types of debugging message you would like to display (the default is to log calls to API functions and methods). These letters are shown in the first column of the log output, and are also listed in ``common/debuglog.h``. If the first character is ``-``, then the letters indicate those categories of message *not* be shown instead. As a consequence of this, setting ``XAPIAN_DEBUG_FLAGS=-`` will give you all debugging messages. These environment variables only have any effect if you ran configure with the --enable-log option. The format is:: <message type> <pid> [<this>] <message> For example:: A 16747 [0x57ad1e0] void Xapian::Query::Internal::validate_query() Each nested call adds another space before the ``[`` so you can easily see which function call and return messages correspond. Debugging memory allocations ============================ The testsuite can make use of valgrind 3.3.0 or newer to check for memory leaks, reads from uninitialised memory, and some other bugs during tests. Valgrind doesn't support every platform, but Xapian contains very little platform specific code (and most of what there is is Microsoft Windows specific) so even just testing with valgrind on one platform gives good coverage. If you have a new enough version of valgrind installed, it's automatically detected by configure and used when running the testsuite. The testsuite runs more slowly under valgrind, so if you wish to disable this auto-detection you can run configure with: ./configure VALGRIND= Or you can disable use of valgrind during a particular run of "make check" like so: make check VALGRIND= Or disable it while running a test directly (under sh or bash): VALGRIND= ./runtest ./apitest Running test programs ===================== To run all tests, use ``make check``. You can also run just the subset of tests which exercise the inmemory, remote progserver, remote TCP, multi-database, brass, chert, or flint backends using ``make check-inmemory``, ``make check-remoteprog``, ``make check-remotetcp``, ``make check-multi``, ``make check-brass``, ``make check-chert``, or ``make check-flint`` respectively. Also, ``make check-remote`` will run the tests on both variants of the remote backend, and ``make check-none`` will run those tests which don't use any backend. These are handy shortcuts when doing development work on a particular backend. The runtest script (in the tests subdirectory) takes care of the details of running the test programs (including setting up the environment so they work when srcdir != builddir and handling libtool dynamically linked binaries). To run a test program by hand (rather than via make) just use: ./runtest ./apitest You can specify options and arguments. Individual test programs optionally take one or more test names as arguments, and you can also pass ``-v`` to get more verbose output from failing tests, e.g.: ./runtest ./apitest -v deldoc1 If the number of the test is omitted, all tests with that basename are run, so to run deldoc1, deldoc2, etc: ./runtest ./apitest deldoc You can also use runtest to run a test program under gdb (or most other tools): ./runtest gdb ./apitest -v deldoc1 ./runtest valgrind ./apitest -v deldoc1 Some test programs take special arguments - for example, you can restrict apitest to the flint backend using ``-bflint``. There are a few environmental variables which the testsuite harness checks for which you might find useful: XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_SIG_DFL: By default, the testsuite harness catches signals and handles them gracefully - the current test is failed, and the testsuite moves onto the next test. If you want to suppress this (some debugging tools may work better if the signal is not caught) set the environment variable XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_SIG_DFL to any value to prevent the testsuite harness from installing its own signal handling. XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_OUTPUT: By default, the testsuite harness uses ANSI escape sequences to give colour output if stdout is a tty. You can disable this feature by setting XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_OUTPUT=plain (alternatively, piping the output (e.g. through ``cat`` or ``more``) will have the same effect). Auto-detection can be explicitly specified with XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_OUTPUT=auto (or empty). Any other value forces the use of colour. Colour output is always disabled on Microsoft Windows, so XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_OUTPUT has no effect there. XAPIAN_TESTSUITE_LD_PRELOAD: The runtest script will add this to LD_PRELOAD if it is set, allowing you to easily load LD_PRELOAD libraries when running the testsuite. The original intended use was to allow use of libeatmydata (https://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/) which makes fsync and related calls no-ops, but configure now checks for the eatmydata wrapper script and this is used automatically. However, there may be other LD_PRELOAD libraries which are useful, so we've left the machinery in place. Speeding up the testsuite with eatmydata ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The testsuite does a lot of small database operations, and the calls to fsync, fdatasync, etc which Xapian makes by default can slow down testsuite runs substantially. There's a handy LD_PRELOAD library called eatmydata (http://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/), which can help here, by turning fsync and related calls into no-ops. You need a version of eatmydata with the eatmydata wrapper script (version 37 or newer), and then configure should auto-detect it and it'll get used when running the testsuite (via runtest). If you wish to disable this auto-detection for some reason, you can run configure with: ./configure EATMYDATA= Or you can disable use of eatmydata during a particular run of "make check" like so: make check EATMYDATA= Or disable it while running a test directly (under sh or bash): EATMYDATA= ./runtest ./apitest Using various debugging, profiling, and leak-finding tools ========================================================== If you're using GCC 3.4 or newer, you can turn on debugging iterators, etc in the GNU C++ STL by defining _GLIBCXX_DEBUG: ./configure CPPFLAGS=-D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG For documentation of this option, see: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/debug.html Note: all C++ code must be compiled with this defined or you'll get problems - Xapian 0.9.7 and later add a suitable check to xapian/version.h to prevent you making this mistake. To use valgrind (http://www.valgrind.org/), no special build options are required, but make sure you compile with debugging information (on by default for GCC) and the valgrind documentation recommends disabling optimisation (with optimisation, line numbers in error messages can be confusing due to code inlining, etc): ./configure CXXFLAGS='-O0 -g' To use gdb (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/), no special build options are required, but make sure you compile with debugging information (on by default for GCC). You'll probably find debugging easier if you compile without optimisation (with optimisation, line numbers in error messages can be confusing due to code inlining, etc, and the values of some variables can't be printed because they've been eliminated from the code completely): ./configure CXXFLAGS='-O0 -g' To enable profiling for gprof: ./configure CXXFLAGS=-pg LDFLAGS=-pg To use Purify (a proprietary tool): ./configure CXXLD='purify c++' --disable-shared To use Insure (another proprietary tool): ./configure CXX=insure To use lcov (at least version 1.10) to generate a test coverage report (see `lcov.xapian.org <http://lcov.xapian.org/>`_ for reports) there are two make targets: * coverage-reconfigure: reruns configure in the source tree. See Makefile.am for details of the configure options used and why they are needed. * coverage-check: runs "make check" and generates an HTML report in a directory called "lcov". If you have runes for using other tools, please add them above, or send them to us so we can. Snapshots ========= If you want to try unreleased Xapian code, you can fetch it from our git repository. For convenience, we also provide bootstrapped tarballs (much like the sourcecode download for any release version) which get built every 20 minutes if there have been any changes checked in. These tarballs need to pass "make distcheck" to be automatically uploaded, so using them will help to assure that you don't pick a "bad" version. The snapshots are available from the "Bleeding Edge" page of the Xapian website. Building from git ================= When building from a git checkout, we *strongly* recommend that you use the ``bootstrap`` script in the top level directory to set up the tree ready for building. This script will check which directories you have checked out, so you can bootstrap a partial tree. You will need the following tools installed to build from git: * GNU m4 (for autoconf) * perl 5 (for automake; also for various maintainer scripts) * python >= 2.3 (for generating the Python bindings) * GNU make (or another make which support VPATH for explicit rules) * GNU flex (for building doxygen) * GNU bison (for building doxygen) * Tcl (to generate unicode/unicode-data.cc) For a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu, this command should ensure you have all the necessary tools and libraries:: apt-get install build-essential m4 perl python zlib1g-dev uuid-dev wget flex bison tcl If you want to build Omega, you'll also need:: apt-get install libpcre3-dev libmagic-dev On Fedora, the uuid library can be installed by doing:: yum install libuuid-devel If building from git, you'll also need git-svn installed. If you're doing much development work, you'll probably also want the following tools installed: * valgrind for better testsuite error finding * ccache for faster rebuilds * eatmydata for faster testsuite runs The repository does not contain any automatically generated files (such as configure, Makefile.in, Snowball-generated stemmers, Lemon-generated parsers, SWIG-generated code, etc) because experience shows it's best to keep these out of version control. To avoid requiring you to install the correct versions of the tools required, we either include the source to these tools in the repo directly (in the case of Snowball and Lemon), or pull them in to a checkout using svn:externals or git-svn (SWIG), or the bootstrap script will lazily download, build, and install them within the source tree (autoconf, automake, libtool, and doxygen). To download the source tarballs for these, bootstrap will use wget or curl if installed. If not, it will give an error telling you the URL to download from by hand and where to copy the file to. Bootstrap will then run autoreconf on each of the checked-out subdirectories, and generate a top-level configure script. This configure script allows you to configure xapian-core and any other modules you've checked out with single simple command, such that the other modules link against the uninstalled xapian-core (which is very handy for development work and a bit fiddly to set up by hand). It automatically passes --enable-maintainer-mode to the subprojects so that the autotools will be rerun if configure.ac, Makefile.am, etc are modified. The bootstrap script doesn't care what the current directory is. The top-level configure script generated by it supports building in a separate directory to the sources: simply create the directory you want to build in, and then run the configure script from inside that directory. For example, to build in a directory called "build" (starting in the top level source directory):: ./bootstrap mkdir build cd build ../configure When running bootstrap, if you need to add any extra macro directories to the path searched by aclocal (which is part of automake), you can do this by specifying these in the ACLOCAL_FLAGS environment variable, e.g.:: ACLOCAL_FLAGS=-I/extra/macro/directory ./bootstrap If you wish to prevent bootstrap from downloading and building the autotools pass the --without-autotools option. You can force it to delete the downloaded and installed versions by passing --clean. If you are tracking development in git, there will sometimes be changes to the build system sources which require regeneration of the generated makefiles and associated machinery. We aim to make the build system automatically regenerate the necessary files, but in the event that a build fails after an update, it may be worth re-running the bootstrap script to regenerate the build system from scratch, before looking for the cause of the error elsewhere. Tools required to build documentation ------------------------------------- If you want to be able to build distribution tarballs (with "make dist") then you'll also need some further tools. If you don't want to have to install all these tools, then pass --disable-documentation to configure to disable these rules (the default state of this follows the setting of --enable-maintainer-mode, so in a non-maintainer-mode tree, you can pass --enable-documentation to enable these rules). Without the documentation, "make dist" will fail (to prevent accidentally distributing tarballs without documentation), but you can configure and build. The documentation tools are: * doxygen (v1.5.9 is used for 1.1.x snapshots and releases; 1.4.6 produced incomplete documentation for Xapian::Query). * dot (part of Graphviz. Doxygen's DOT_MULTI_TARGETS option apparently needs ">1.8.10") * gs (part of Ghostscript) * pdflatex (in texlive-latex-base on Debian/Ubuntu) * epstopdf (in texlive-extra-utils on Debian/Ubuntu) * makeindex (in texlive-binaries on Debian/Ubuntu, or texlive-base-bin for older releases) * help2man * rst2html or rst2html.py (in python-docutils on Debian/Ubuntu) * pngcrush (optional - used to reduce the size of PNG files in the HTML apidocs) Note that pdflatex, epstopdf, gs, and makeindex must all currently be on your path (as specified by the environmental variable PATH), since doxygen will look for them there. For a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu, this command should install all the required documentation tools:: apt-get install doxygen graphviz ghostscript texlive-latex-base texlive-extra-utils texlive-binaries texlive-fonts-extra texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-recommended help2man python-docutils pngcrush Autotools versions ------------------ * autoconf 2.68 is used to generate snapshots and releases. autoconf 2.64 is a hard minimum requirement. autoconf 2.60 is required for docdir support and AC_TYPE_SSIZE_T. autoconf 2.62 generates faster configure scripts and warns about unrecognised options passed to configure. autoconf 2.63 fixes a regression in AC_C_BIGENDIAN introduced in 2.62 (Omega uses this macro). autoconf 2.64 generates smaller configure scripts by using shell functions. * automake 1.11.6 is used to generate snapshots and releases. automake 1.10.2 is a hard minimum requirement. automake 1.10 requires autoconf 2.60 and Perl 5.6. automake 1.10.1 fixes "make clean" to remove .libs from bin/ and examples/. automake 1.10.2 fixes a few bugs (not investigated if these affect Xapian) * libtool 2.4.6 is used to generate snapshots and releases. libtool 2.2.8 is the current hard minimum requirement. libtool 2.2 is required for us to be able to override link_all_deplibs_CXX and sys_lib_dlsearch_path_spec in configure. It also fixes some long-standing issues and is significantly faster. Please tell us if you find that newer versions of any of these tools work or fail to work. There is a good GNU autotools tutorial at <http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~adl/autotools.html>. Building from git on Windows with MSVC -------------------------------------- The windows build process is maintained in the xapian-maintainer-tools directory in the Xapian git repository. See the win32msvc/README file in that directory for details of how to build from git. Use of C++ Features =================== * STL: We decided early on to embrace the C++ STL. Some older compilers don't include full support for this. Often we can work around this, and we should do where the effort is low compared to the gain (so a compiler version which is widely used is more worth supporting than one which is hardly used by anyone). There is now plenty of choice of compilers which provide good conformance to ISO C++, so if working around problems for some compiler proves too hard we should just document the issue and users will either have to upgrade to a more compliant compiler, or use another STL implementation such as STLport (http://stlport.sourceforge.net/). * C++ features we currently assume: * We assume <sstream> is available. GCC < 2.95.3 didn't have it but GCC 2.95.3 includes a backported version. We aren't aware of any other compilers still in use which lack it. * Non-".h" versions of standard ISO C++ headers (e.g. ``#include <list>`` rather than ``#include <list.h>``). We aren't aware of any compiler still in use which lacks these, and GCC 4.3 no longer has the old versions. If there are any, we could add a directory full of forwarding headers to work around this issue. * Standard header ``<limits>`` (for ``numeric_limits<>``) - for GCC, this was added in GCC 3.0. * Standard header ``<streambuf>`` (GCC < 3.0 only has ``<streambuf.h>``). * Working auto_ptr in header ``<memory>`` (some old version of some compiler had a buggy implementation - the details are lost to history, but it may have been GCC 2.95, or perhaps EGCS). * RTTI (dynamic_cast<>, typeid, etc): Needing to use RTTI features in the library most likely indicates a design flaw, and you should avoid use of these features. Where necessary, you can use a technique similar to Database::as_networkdatabase() to replace dynamic_cast<>. * Exceptions: In hindsight, throwing exceptions in the library seems to have been a poor design decision. GCC on Solaris can't cope with exceptions in shared libraries (though it appears this may have been fixed in more recent versions), and we've also had test failures on other platforms which only occur with shared libraries - possibly with a similar cause. Exceptions can also be a pain to handle elegantly in the bindings. We intend to investigate modifying the library to return error codes internally, and then offering the user the choice of exception throwing or error code returning API methods (with the exception being thrown by an inlined wrapper in the externally visible header files). With this in mind, please don't complicate the internal handling of exceptions... * "using namespace std;" and "using std::XXX;" - it's OK to use these in applications, library code, and internal library headers. But in externally visible headers (such as anything included by "#include <xapian.h>") you MUST use explicit "std::" qualifiers - it's not acceptable to pull anything from namespace std into the namespace of an application which uses Xapian. * Use C++ style casts (static_cast<>, reinterpret_cast<>, and const_cast<>) or constructor-syntax (e.g. ``double(value)``) in preference to C style casts. The syntax of the C++ casts is ugly, but they do make the intent much clearer which is definitely a good thing. * std::pair<> with an STL class as one (or both) of the members can produce very long symbols (over 4KB!) after name mangling - long enough to overflow the size limits of some vendor compilers or toolchains (so this can affect GCC if it is using the system ld or as). Even where the compiler works, the symbol bloat in an unstripped build is probably best avoided, so it's preferable to use a simple two member struct instead. The code is probably more readable anyway, and easier to extend if more members are needed later. * We try to avoid putting the full definition of virtual methods in header files. This is because current compilers can't (as far as we know) inline virtual methods, so putting the definition in the header file simply slows down compilation (and, because method definitions often require further header files to be included, this can result in many more files needing recompilation after a change to a header file than is really necessary). Just put the declaration in the header file, and put the definition in a .cc file with the same basename. Include ordering for source files --------------------------------- To help us move towards a consistent ordering of #include lines in source files, please follow the following policy when ordering them: * #include <config.h> should be first, and use <> not "" (as recommended by the autoconf manual). * The header corresponding to the source file should be next. This means that compilation of the library ensures that each header with a corresponding source file is "self supporting" (i.e. it implicitly or explicitly includes all of the headers it requires). * External xapian-core headers, alphabetically. When included from other external headers, use <> to reduce problems with finding headers in the user's source tree by mistake. In sources and internal headers, use "" (?) - practically this makes no difference as we have -I for srcdir and builddir, but <> suggests installed header files so "" seems more natural). * Internal headers, alphabetically (using ""). * "Safe" versions of library headers (include these first to avoid issues if other library headers include the ones we want to wrap). Use "" and order alphabetically. * Library headers, alphabetically. * Standard C++ headers, alphabetically. Use the modern (no .h suffix) names. C++ Portability Issues ====================== Web Resources ------------- The "C++ FAQ Lite" covers many frequently asked C++ questions: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/ Header Portability Issues ------------------------- <fcntl.h>: ---------- Don't directly '#include <fcntl.h>' - instead '#include "safefcntl.h"'. The main reason for this is that when using certain compilers on certain versions of Solaris, fcntl.h does '#define open open64'. Sadly this breaks C++ code which has methods called open (as we do). There's a cunning workaround for this problem in common/safefcntl.h. Also, safefcntl.h ensures the O_BINARY is defined (to 0 if not required) so calls to open() and creat() can specify O_BINARY unconditionally for the benefit of platforms which discriminate between text and binary files. <windows.h>: ------------ Don't directly '#include <windows.h>' - instead '#include "safewindows.h"' which reduces the bloat of header files included and prevents some of the more egregious namespace pollution. It also defines any constants we need which might be missing in older versions of the mingw headers. <winsock2.h>: ------------- Don't directly '#include <winsock2.h>' - instead '#include "safewinsock2.h"'. This ensure that safewindows.h is included before <winsock2.h> to avoid winsock2.h including windows.h without our namespace pollution reducing workarounds. <errno.h>: ---------- Don't directly '#include <errno.h>' - instead '#include "safeerrno.h"' which works around a problem with Compaq's C++ compiler. <sys/select.h>: --------------- Don't directly '#include <sys/select.h>' - instead '#include "safesysselect.h"' which supports older UNIX platforms which predate POSIX 1003.1-2001 and works around a problem on Solaris. <sys/stat.h>: ------------- Don't directly '#include <sys/stat.h>' - instead '#include "safesysstat.h"' which under MSVC enables stat to work on files > 2GB, defines the missing POSIX macros S_ISDIR and S_ISREG, pulls in <direct.h> for mkdir() (which is provided by sys/stat.h under UNIX) and provides a compatibility wrapper for mkdir() which takes 2 arguments (so code using mkdir can always just pass two arguments). <sys/wait.h>: ------------- To get `WEXITSTATUS` or `WIFEXITED` defined, '#include "safesyswait.h"'. Note that this won't provide `waitpid()`, etc on Microsoft Windows, since these functions are only really useful to use when `fork()` is available. <unistd.h>: ----------- Don't directly '#include <unistd.h>' - instead '#include "safeunistd.h"' - MSVC doesn't even HAVE unistd.h! The various "safe" headers are maintained in xapian-core/common, but also used by Omega. Omega pulls in a copy using the svn:externals property which is set on xapian-applications/omega. Because of how this feature of SVN works, we pull in a read-only copy via HTTP access to the main repository, so you have to update it in xapian-core, and if you have ssh write access to the repo but no HTTP access, this will fail. The imported URL has to be absolute, which isn't too branch friendly. To avoid problems from this, we specify a particular revision to import, but this does mean we need to monitor changes to xapian-core and decide when to update omega. The release checklist includes a reminder to check this. Warning-Free Compilation ------------------------ Compiling without warnings on every platform is our goal, though it's not always possible to achieve. For example, some GCC 3.x compilers produce the occasional bogus warning (e.g. warning that a variable may be used uninitialised, despite it being initialised at the point of declaration!) You should consider configure-ing with: ./configure CXXFLAGS=-Werror when doing development work on Xapian. This promotes warnings to errors, which should ensure you at least don't introduce new warnings for the compiler you're using. If you configure with --enable-maintainer-mode, and are using GCC 4.1 or newer, this is done for you automatically. This is intended to be an aid rather than a form of automated punishment - it's all too easy to miss a new warning as once a file is compiled, you don't see it unless you modify that file or one of its dependencies. With Intel's C++ compiler, --enable-maintainer-mode also enables -Werror. If you know the equivalent of -Werror for other compilers, please add a note here, or tell us so that we can add a note. Miscellaneous Portability Issues -------------------------------- Make sure that the last line of any source file ends with a linefeed character since it's undefined behaviour if it doesn't (most compilers accept it, though at least GCC gives a warning). Branch Prediction Hints ======================= For compilers which support ``__builtin_expect()`` (GCC >= 3.0 and some others) you can provide manual hints to assist branch prediction. We've wrapped these in macros which evaluate to just their argument for compilers which don't support ``__builtin_expect()__``. Within the xapian-core library code, you can mark the expressions in ``if`` and ``while`` statements as ``rare`` (if the condition is rarely true) or ``usual`` (if the condition is usually true). For example:: if (rare(something_unusual())) deal_with_it(); while (usual(!end_condition()) keep_going(); It's easy to make incorrect assumptions about where hotspots are and which branches are usually taken or not, so except for really obvious cases (such as ``if (!consistency_check()) throw_exception();``) you should benchmark that new ``rare`` and ``usual`` hints help rather than hinder before committing them to the repository. It's also likely to be a waste of effort to add them outside of areas of code which are executed very frequently. Don't expect miracles - the first 15 uses added saved approximately 1%. If you know how to implement the ``rare`` and ``usual`` macros for other compilers, please let us know. Configure Options ================= Especially for a library, compile-time options aren't a good solution for how to integrate a new feature. An increasingly large number of users install pre-built binary packages rather than building from source, and unless the package is capable of being split into modules, the packager has to choose a set of compile-time options to use. And they'll tend to choose either the standard ones, or perhaps a broader set to try to keep everyone happy. For a library, similar issues occur when installing from source as well - the sysadmin must choose the options which will keep all users happy. Another problem with compile-time options is that it's hard to ensure that a change doesn't break compilation under some combination of options without actually building and running the test-suite on all combinations. The fewer compile-time options, the more likely the code will compile with every combination of them. So please think carefully before adding more compile-time options. They're probably OK for experimental features (but should go away once a feature is no longer experimental). Options to instrument a build for special purposes (debug, profiling, etc) are also acceptable. Disabling whole features probably isn't (e.g. the --disable-backend-XXX options we already have are dubious, though being able to disable the remote backend can be useful when trying to get Xapian going on a platform). Makefile Portability ==================== We don't want to force those building Xapian from the source distribution to have to use GNU make. Requiring GNU make for "make dist" isn't such a problem but it's probably better to use portable constructs everywhere to avoid problems when people move or copy code between targets. If you do make use of non-portable constructs where it's OK, add a comment noting the special circumstances which justify doing so. Here's an incomplete list of things to avoid: * Don't use "$(RM)" - it's defined by GNU make, but using it actually harms portability as other makes don't define it. Use plain "rm" instead. * Don't use "%" pattern rules - these are GNU make specific. Use an implicit rule (e.g. ".c.o:") if you can. Otherwise, write out each version explicitly. * Don't use "$<" except in implicit rules. This is an annoying restriction, as using "$<" makes it much easier to make VPATH builds work. But it's only portable in implicit rules. Tips for rewriting - if it's a source file, write it as:: $(srcdir)/foo.ext If it's a generated object file or similar, just write the name as is. The tricky case is a generated file which isn't in SVN but is shipped in the distribution tarball, as such a file could be in either the source or build tree. Use this trick to make sure it's found whichever directory it's in:: `test -f foo.ext || echo '$(srcdir)/'`foo.ext * Don't use "exit 0" to make a rule fail. Use "false" instead. BSD make doesn't like "exit 0" in a rule. * Don't use make conditionals. Automake offers conditionals which may be of use, and these are implemented to work with any make. See the automake manual for details, and a few caveats. * The list of portable utilities is: cat cmp cp diff echo egrep expr false grep install-info ln ls mkdir mv pwd rm rmdir sed sleep sort tar test touch true Note that versions of these (GNU versions in particular) support switches which aren't portable - notably, "test -r" isn't portable; neither is "cp -a". And note that "mkdir -p" isn't portable - the semantics vary. The autoconf manual has some useful information about writing portable shell code (most of it not specific to autoconf):: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Portable-Shell * Don't use "include" - it's not present in BSD make (at least some versions have ".include" instead, but that doesn't really seem to help...) Automake provides a configure-time include, which may provide a replacement for some uses of "include". * It appears that BSD make only supports VPATH for implicit rules (e.g. ".c.o:") - there's certainly a restriction there which is not present in GNU make. We used to try to work around this, but now we use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to disable rules which are only needed by those developing Xapian (these were the rules which caused problems). And we recommend those developing Xapian use GNU make to avoid problems. * Rules with multiple targets can cause problems for parallel builds. These rules are really just a shorthand for multiple rules with the same prerequisites and commands, and it is fine to use them in this way. However, a common temptation is to use them when a single invocation of a command generates multiple output files, by adding each of the output files as a target. Eg, if a swig language module generates xapian_wrap.cc and xapian_wrap.h, it is tempting to add a single rule something like:: # This rule has a problem xapian_wrap.cc xapian_wrap.h: xapian.i SWIG_commands This can result in SWIG_commands being run twice, in parallel. If SWIG_commands generates any temporary files, the two invocations can interfere causing one of them to fail. Instead of this rule, one solution is to pick one of the output files as a primary target, and add a dependency for the second output file on the first output file:: # This rule also has a problem xapian_wrap.h: xapian_wrap.cc xapian_wrap.cc: xapian.i SWIG_commands This ensures that make knows that only one invocation of SWIG_commands is necessary, but could result in problems if the invocation of SWIG_commands failed after creating xapian_wrap.cc, but before creating xapian_wrap.h. Instead, we recommend creating an intermediate target:: # This rule works in most cases xapian_wrap.cc xapian_wrap.h: xapian_wrap.stamp xapian_wrap.stamp: xapian.i SWIG_commands touch $@ Because the intermediate target is only touched after the commands have executed successfully, subsequent builds will always retry the commands if an error occurs. Note that the intermediate target cannot be a "phony" target because this would result in the commands being re-run for every build. However, this rule still has a problem - if the xapian_wrap.cc and xapian_wrap.h files are removed, but the xapian_wrap.stamp file is not, the .cc and .h files will not be regenerated. There is no simple solution to this, but the following is a recipe taken from the automake manual which works. For details of *why* it works, see the section in the automake manual titled "Multiple Outputs":: # This rule works even if some of the output files were removed xapian_wrap.cc xapian_wrap.h: xapian_wrap.stamp ## Recover from the removal of $@. A full explanation of these rules is in ## the automake manual under the heading "Multiple Outputs". @if test -f $@; then :; else \ trap 'rm -rf xapian_wrap.lock xapian_wrap.stamp' 1 2 13 15; \ if mkdir xapian_wrap.lock 2>/dev/null; then \ rm -f xapian_wrap.stamp; \ $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) xapian_wrap.stamp; \ rmdir xapian_wrap.lock; \ else \ while test -d xapian_wrap.lock; do sleep 1; done; \ test -f xapian_wrap.stamp; exit $$?; \ fi; \ fi xapian_wrap.stamp: xapian.i SWIG_commands touch $@ * This is actually a robustness point, not portability per se. Rules which generate files should be careful not to leave a partial file in place if there's an error as it will have a timestamp which leads make to believe it's up-to-date. So this is bad: foo.cc: script.pl $PERL script.pl > foo.cc This is better: foo.cc: script.pl $PERL script.pl > foo.tmp mv foo.tmp foo.cc Alternatively, pass the output filename to the script and make sure you delete the output on error or a signal (although this approach can leave a partial file in place if the power fails). All used Makefile.am-s and scripts have been checked (and fixed if required) as of 2003-07-10 (didn't check xapian-bindings). * Another robustness point - if you add a non-file target to a makefile, you should also list it in ".PHONY". Otherwise your target won't get remade reliably if someone creates a file with the same name in their tree. For example: .PHONY: hello goodbye hello: echo hello goodbye: echo goodbye And lastly a style point - using "@" to suppress echoing of commands being executed removes choice from the user - they may want to see what commands are being executed. And if they don't want to, many versions of make support the use "make -s" to suppress the echoing of commands. Using @echo on a message sent to stdout or stderr is acceptable (since it avoids showing the message twice). Otherwise don't use "@" - it makes it harder to track down problems in the makefiles. Naming of Scripts ================= Scripts generally should *not* have an extension indicating the language they are currently implemented in (e.g. ``runtest`` rather than ``runtest.sh`` or ``runtest.pl``). The problem with such an extension is that if we decide to reimplement the script in a different language, we either have to rename the script (which is annoying as people will be used to the name, and may have embedded it in their own scripts), or we have a script with a confusing name (e.g. a Python script with extension ``.pl``). The above reasoning doesn't apply to scripts which have to be in a particular language for some reason, though for consistency they probably shouldn't get an extension either, unless there's a good reason to have one. Use of Assert ============= Use Assert to perform internal consistency checks, and to check for invalid arguments to functions and methods (e.g. passing a NULL pointer when this isn't permitted). It should *NOT* be used to check for error conditions such as file read errors, memory allocation failing, etc (since we want to perform such checks in non-debug builds too). File format errors should also not be tested with Assert - we want to catch a corrupted database or a malformed input file in a non-debug build too. There are several variants of Assert: - Assert(P) -- asserts that expression P is true. - AssertRel(a,rel,b) -- asserts that (a rel b) is true - rel can be a boolean relational operator, i.e. one of ``==``, ``!=``, ``>``, ``>=``, ``<``, ``<=``. The message given if the assertion fails reports the values of a and b, so ``AssertRel(a,<,b);`` is more helpful than ``Assert(a < b);`` - AssertEq(a,b) -- shorthand for AssertRel(a,==,b). - AssertEqDouble(a,b) -- asserts a and b differ by less than DBL_EPSILON - AssertParanoid(P) -- a particularly expensive assertion. If you want a build with Asserts enabled, but without a great performance overhead, then passing --enable-assertions=partial to configure and AssertParanoids won't be checked, but Asserts will. You can also use AssertRelParanoid and AssertEqParanoid. - CompileTimeAssert(P) -- if P is a constant expression, CompileTimeAssert can be used to assert it is non-zero at compile-time - the P evaluates to zero, then the compilation will fail with an error. CompileTimeAssert can only be used inside a function body. There should be no runtime overhead for using CompileTimeAssert(), so CompileTimeAssert() is always enabled, regardless of whether --enable-assertions is passed to configure or not. Marking Features as Deprecated ============================== In the API headers, a feature (a class, method, function, enum, typedef, etc) can be marked as deprecated by using the XAPIAN_DEPRECATED() or XAPIAN_DEPRECATED_CLASS macros. Note that you can't deprecate a preprocessor macro. For compilers with a suitable mechanism (currently GCC 3.1 or later, and MSVC 7.0 or later) this causes compile-time warning messages to be emitted for any use of the deprecated feature. For compilers without support, the macro just expands to its argument. You must add this line to any API header which uses XAPIAN_DEPRECATED() or XAPIAN_DEPRECATED_CLASS:: #include <xapian/deprecated.h> When marking a feature as deprecated, document the deprecation in docs/deprecation.rst. When actually removing deprecated features, please tidy up by removing the inclusion of <xapian/deprecated.h> from any file which no longer marks any features as deprecated. The XAPIAN_DEPRECATED() macro should wrap the whole declaration except for the semicolon and any "definition" part, for example:: XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(int old_function(double arg)); class Foo { public: XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(int old_method()); XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(int old_const_method() const); XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(static int old_static_method()); XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(static const int OLD_CONSTANT) = 42; }; Mark a class as deprecated by inserting ``XAPIAN_DEPRECATED_CLASS`` after the class keyword like so:: class XAPIAN_DEPRECATED_CLASS Foo { public: Foo() { } // ... }; To avoid compilation errors with older GCC versions (noted with GCC 3.3.5), you can't mark a method which is defined inline in a class with ``XAPIAN_DEPRECATED()`` (this works with recent GCC versions though):: class Foo { public: // This fails to compile with GCC 3.3.5, so don't do this! XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(int old_inline_method()) { return 42; } }; Instead rewrite like so:: class Foo { public: XAPIAN_DEPRECATED(int old_inline_method()); }; inline int Foo::old_inline_method() { return 42; } Submitting Patches: =================== If you have a patch to fix a problem in Xapian, or to add a new feature, please send it to us for inclusion. Any major changes should be discussed on the xapian-devel mailing list first: <http://xapian.org/lists> Also, please read the following section on licensing of patches before submitting a patch. We find patches in unified diff format easiest to read. If you're using git, then "git diff" is good (or "git format-patch" for a patch series). If you're using a SVN checkout just use "svn diff" to generate the diff. If you're working from a tarball, you can unpack a second clean copy of the files and compare the two versions with "diff -pruN" (-p reports the function name for each chunk, -r acts recursively, -u does a unified diff, and -N shows new files in the diff). Alternatively "ptardiff" (which comes with perl, at least on Debian and Ubuntu) can diff against the original tarball, unpacking it on the fly. Please set the width of a tab character in your editor to 8 spaces, and use Unix line endings (i.e. LF, not CR+LF). Failing to do so will make it much harder for us to merge in your changes. We don't currently have a formal coding standards document, but please try to follow the style of the existing code. In particular: * Indent C++ code by 4 spaces for a new indentation level, and set your editor to tab-fill indentation (with a tab being 8 spaces wide). As an exception, "public", "protected" and "private" declarations in classes and structs should be indented by 2 spaces, and the following code should be indented by 2 more spaces:: class Foo { public: method(); }; The rationale for this exception is that class definitions in header files often have fairly long lines, so losing an indent level to the access specifier tends to make class definitions less readable. The default access for a class is always "private", so there's no need to specify that explicitly - in other words, write this:: class Foo { int internal_method(); public: int external_method(); }; Don't write this:: class Foo { private: int internal_method(); public: int external_method(); }; If a class only contains public methods and data, consider declaring it as a "struct" (the only difference in C++ is that the default access for a struct is "public"). * Put a space before the "(" after control flow constructs like "for", "if", "while", etc. Don't put a space before the "(" in function calls. So write "if (strlen(p) > 10)" not "if(strlen (p) > 10)". * When "if", "else", "for", "while", "do," "switch", "case", "default", "try", or "catch" is followed by a block enclosed in braces, the opening brace should be on the same line, like so:: if (x > 12) { foo(x); x = 12; } else { bar(x); } The rationale for this is that it conserves vertical space (allowing more code to fit on screen) without reducing readability. * If you have an empty loop body, use `{ }` rather than `;` as the former stands out more clearly to the reader (but also consider if the code might be clearer written a different way). * Prefer "++i;" to "i++;", "i += 1;", or "i = i + 1". For simple integer variables these should generate equivalent (if not identical) code, but if i is an iterator object then the pre-increment form can be more efficient in some cases with some compilers. It's simpler and more consistent to always use the pre-increment form (unless you make use of the old value which the post-increment form returns). For the same reasons, prefer "--i;" to "i--;", "i -= 1;", or "i = i - 1;". * Prefer "container.empty()" to "container.size() == 0" (and "!container.empty()" to "container.size() != 0" or "container.size() > 0"). Finding the size of a container may not be a constant time operation for all containers (e.g. std::list may not be, and indeed isn't for GCC - see https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/containers.html#sequences.list.size). Also the "empty()" form makes the intent of the test more explicit. * Prefer not to use "else" when the control flow is diverted elsewhere at the end of the "if" block (e.g. by "return", "continue", "break", "throw"). This eliminates a level of indentation from the code in the "else" block, and typically makes the control flow logic clearer. For example:: if (x == 0) { foo(); return; } while (x--) { bar(); } rather than:: if (x == 0) { foo(); return; } else { while (x--) { bar(); } } * For standard ISO C headers, prefer the C++ form for ISO C headers (e.g. "#include <cstdlib>" rather than "#include <stdlib.h>") unless there's a good reason (e.g. portability) to do otherwise. Be sure to document such exceptions to avoid another developer changing them to the standard form. Global exceptions: <signal.h> (lots of POSIX stuff which e.g. Sun's compiler doesn't provide in <csignal>). * For standard ISO C++ headers, *always* use the ISO C++ form '#include <list>' (pre-ISO compilers used '#include <list.h>', but GCC has generated a warning for this form for years, and GCC 4.3 dropped support entirely). * Some guidelines for efficient use of std::string: + When passing an empty string to a method expecting ``const std::string &`` prefer ``std::string()`` to ``""`` or ``std::string("")`` as the first form is more likely to directly use a special "empty string representation" (it does with GCC at least). + To make a string object empty, ``s.resize(0)`` (if you want to keep the current reserved space) or ``s = string()`` (if you don't) seem the best options. + Use ``std::string::assign()`` rather than building a temporary string object and assigning that. For example, ``foo = std::string(ptr, len);`` is better written as ``foo.assign(ptr, len);``. + It's generally better to build up strings using ``+=`` rather than combining series of components with ``+``. So ``foo = a + " and " + c`` is better written as ``foo = a; foo += " and "; foo += c;``. It's possible for compilers to handle the former without a lot of temporary string objects by returning a proxy object to allow the concatenation to happen lazily, but not all compilers do this, and it's likely to still have some overhead. Note that GCC 4.1 seems to produce larger code in some cases for the latter approach, but it's a definite win with GCC 4.4. * ``std::string(1, '\0')`` seems to be slightly more efficient than ``std::string("", 1)`` for constructing a std::string containing a single ASCII nul character. * Prefer ``new SomeClass`` to ``new SomeClass()``, since the latter tends to lead one to write ``SomeClass foo();` which is a function prototype, and not equivalent to the variable definition ``SomeClass foo``. However, note that ``new SomePODType()`` is *not* the same as ``new SomePODType`` (if SomePODType is a POD (Plain Old Data) type) - the former will zero-initialise scalar members of SomePODType. * When catching an exception which is an object, do it by const reference, so like this:: try { foo(); } catch (const ErrorClass &e) { bar(e); } Catching by value is bad because it "slices" the object if an object of a derived type is thrown. Even if derived types aren't a worry, it also causes the copy constructor to be called needlessly. See also: http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/exceptions.html#faq-17.7 A const reference is preferable to a non-const reference as it stops the object being inadvertently modified. In the rare cases when you want to modify the caught object, a non-const reference is OK. We will do our best to give credit where credit is due - if we have used patches from you, or received helpful reports or advice, we will add your name to the AUTHORS file (unless you specifically request us not to). If you see we have forgotten to do this, please draw it to our attention so that we can address the omission. Licensing of patches ==================== If you want a patch to be considered for inclusion in the Xapian sources, you must own the copyright on this patch. Employers often claim copyright on code written by their employees (even if the code is written in their spare time), so please check with your employer if this applies. Be aware that even if you are a student your university may try and claim some rights on code which you write. Patches which are submitted to Xapian will only be included if the copyright holder(s) dual-license them under each of the following licences: - GPL version 2 and all later versions (see the file "COPYING" for details). - MIT/X license:: Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. The current distribution of Xapian contains many files which are only licensed under the GPL, but we are working towards being able to distribute Xapian under a more permissive license, and are not willing to accept patches which we will have to rewrite before this can happen. Developers with SVN access: =========================== People who are more seriously involved with the project are likely to have write access to the SVN repository. This section gives the conventions for those developers, but most of these also apply if you're generating a patch you'd like us to include. 1) Make sure that the documentation is updated ---------------------------------------------- * API classes, methods, functions, and types must be documented by documentation comments alongside the declaration in ``include/xapian/*.h``. These are collated by doxygen - see doxygen's documentation for details of the supported syntax. We've decided to prefer to use @ rather than \ to introduce doxygen commands (the choice is essentially arbitrary, though \ introduces C/C++ escape sequences so @ is likely to make for easier to read mark up for C/C++ coders). A *lot* of existing comments use \ currently but please use @ for new comments. * The documentation comments don't give users a good overview, so we also need documentation which gives a good overview of how to achieve particular tasks. In particularly, major new functionality should have its own "topic" document, or extend an existing topic document if more appropriate. * Internal classes, etc should also be documented by documentation comments where they are declared. 2) Make sure the tests are right -------------------------------- * If you're adding a feature, also add feature tests for it. These both ensure that the feature isn't broken to start with and detect if later changes stop it working as intended. * If you've fixed a bug, make sure there's a regression test which fails on the existing code and succeeds after your changes. * Make sure all existing tests continue to pass. If you don't know how to write tests using the Xapian test rig, then ask. It's reasonably simple once you've done it once. There is a brief introduction to the Xapian test system in ``docs/tests.html``. 3) Make sure the attributions are right --------------------------------------- * If necessary, modify the copyright statement at the top of any files you've altered. If there is no copyright statement, you may add one (there are a couple of Makefile.am's and similar that don't have copyright statements; anything that small doesn't really need one anyway, so it's a judgement call). If you've added files which you've written from scratch, they should include the GPL boilerplate with your name only. * If you're not in there, add yourself to the AUTHORS file. 4) Commit --------- * Commit: + If there's a trac ticket or other reference for the bug, mention it in the commit message - it's a great help to future developers trying to work out why a change was made. 5) Consider backporting ----------------------- * If there's an active release branch, check if the bug is present in that branch, and if the fix is appropriate to backport - if the fix breaks ABI compatibility or is very invasive, you need to fix it in a different way for the release branch, or decide not to backport the fix. 6) Update trac -------------- * If there's a related trac ticket, update it (if the issue is completely addressed by the changes you've made, then close it). * Update the release notes for the most recent release with a copy of the patch. If the commit from git applies cleanly, you can just link to it. If it fails to apply, please attach an adjusted patch which does. If there are conflicts in test cases which aren't easy to resolve, it is acceptable to just drop those changes from the patch if we can still be confident that the issue is actually fixed by the patch. API Structure Notes =================== We use reference counted pointers for most API classes. These are implemented using Xapian::Internal::RefCntPtr, the implementation of which is exposed for efficiency, and because it's unlikely we'll need to change it frequently, if at all. For the reference counted classes, the API class (e.g. Xapian::Enquire) is really just a wrapper around a reference counted pointer. This points to an internal class (e.g. Xapian::Enquire::Internal). The reference counted pointer is a member variable of the API class called internal. Conceptually this member is private, though it typically isn't declared as private (this is to avoid littering the external headers with friend declarations for non-API classes). There are a few exceptions to the reference counted structure, such as MSetIterator and ESetIterator which have an exposed implementation. Tests show this makes a substantial difference to speed (it's ~20% faster) in typical cases of iterator use. The postfix operator++ for iterators should be implemented inline in terms of the prefix form as described by Joe Buck on the gcc mailing list - excerpt from http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel:50201 :: class some_iterator { public: // ... some_iterator& operator++(); some_iterator operator++(int) { some_iterator tmp = *this; operator++(); return tmp; } }; The compiler is allowed to assume that the copy constructor only does a copy, and to optimize away unneeded copy operations. The result in this case should be that, for some_iterator above, using the postfix operator without using the result should give code equivalent to using the prefix operator. Now, for [GCC 3.4], you'll find that the dead uses of tmp are only completely optimized away if tmp has only one data member that can fit in a register. [GCC 4.0 will do] better, and you should find that this style comes very close to eliminating any penalty from "incorrect" use of the postfix form. Xapian's PostingIterator, TermIterator, PositionIterator, and ValueIterator all have only one data member which fits in a register. Handy tips for aiding development ================================= If you are find you are repeatedly changing the API headers (in include/) during development, then you may become annoyed that the docs/ subdirectory will rebuild the doxygen documentation every time you run "make" since this takes a while. You can disable this temporarily (if you're using GNU make), by creating a file "docs/GNUmakefile" containing these two lines:: %: @echo "Skipping 'make $@' in docs" Note that the whitespace at the start of the second line needs to be a single "tab" character! Don't forget to remove (or rename) this and check the documentation builds before committing or generating a patch though! How to make a release ===================== This is a (hopefully complete) list of the jobs which need doing: * Email Fabrice Colin and Tim Brody so they can check RPM packaging. * Check if `config/config.guess` and `config/config.sub` need updating to more recent versions from http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git * Check the revision currently specified in the svn:externals property of xapian-applications/omega. Unless there's a good reason, we should release xapian-core and omega with synchronised versions of the shared files. * Make sure that any new/changed/removed API methods in xapian-core have been wrapped/updated/removed in xapian-bindings. * Update the lists of deprecated/removed API methods in docs/deprecation.rst * Update the NEWS files using information from the ChangeLog files * Update the version in configure.ac for each module (xapian-core, omega, and xapian-bindings), and the library version info in xapian-core's configure.ac * Make sure the submitters of fixed bugs are mentioned in the "thanks" list in xapian-core/AUTHORS. Check the list for the appropriate milestone:: http://trac.xapian.org/query?col=id&col=summary&col=reporter&milestone=1.0.14 * On atreus, svn tag the source trees for the new revision - use the svn-tag-release script, running it with the new version number, for example: xapian-maintainer-tools/svn-tag-release 1.0.14 This script also generates tarballs for the new release and copies them across to the website. * Add the new version to the list of versions in trac: http://trac.xapian.org/admin/ticket/versions * Add a new milestone for the version after this one: http://trac.xapian.org/admin/ticket/milestones * Mark the current milestone as completed. In order to do so, any unfixed bugs with this milestone will need to be moved to another milestone (most likely the milestone you just added). * Update the wiki: Create a new page http://wiki.xapian.org/ReleaseNotes/X.Y.Z and link it into http://wiki.xapian.org/ReleaseNotes in place of the old current release link, which should be moved to the archived section. Also update the roadmap at http://wiki.xapian.org/RoadMap by recording the date of this release and adding an entry for the next release with an estimated release date. * Update the website: `generate` in the CVS module www.xapian.org contains the latest version and the date it was released. * Run /home/olly/tmp/xapian-website-update/update_website.sh * Announce the new version on xapian-discuss * Have a nice cup of tea! How to make Debian packages for a new release ============================================= Debian control files are stored in separate git repositories: * http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/xapian-bindings.git * http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/xapian-core.git * http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/xapian-omega.git To package a new upstream release, these should be updated as follows: * If there are any patch files in "debian/patches", check if these have been incorporated into the new release, and if so remove them and update "debian/patches/series". * Update the debian/changelog file, being sure to keep it in the standard Debian format (the easiest way is to use the dch utility like so: "dch -v 1.2.19-1". The new version number should be the version number of the release followed by "-1" (i.e., a debian patch number of 1). The changelog message should indicate that there is a new upstream release, and should mention any significant changes in the new release. * Tag using: ``git tag -s -m 1.2.19-1 1.2.19-1`` * FIXME: Document how to make source packages, or update ``make-source-packages``. * FIXME: Document how to build binary packages, or update ``build-packages``. * Test the packages. * Run ``debsign build/*_amd64.changes`` to GPG sign the packages. * Run ``dput build/*_amd64.changes`` to upload them to Debian. * For the Ubuntu backports:: ./backport-source-packages xapian-core 1.2.19-1 ubuntu ./backport-source-packages xapian-omega 1.2.19-1 ubuntu ./backport-source-packages xapian-bindings 1.2.19-1 ubuntu And once libsearch-xapian-perl is uploaded to Debian unstable:: ./backport-source-packages libsearch-xapian-perl 1.2.19.0-1 ubuntu Then sign:: debsign build/*99*_source.changes Upload:: dput xapian-backports build/xapian-core*99*_source.changes Wait for that to have a chance to build, and then:: dput xapian-backports build/xapian-[bo]*99*_source.changes dput xapian-backports build/libsearch-xapian-perl*_source.changes .. vim: syntax=