Helmut Grohne writes: > Control: severity -1 normal > Control: retitle -1 topdirs no longer accepts relative paths > > Thanks for your quick reply! > > On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 04:42:02PM +0200, Jean-Francois Dockes wrote: > > The way to specify things to be indexed is to set the "topdirs" variable > > inside someconfdir/recoll.conf. This can be set by editing the file or from > > the indexing configuration section of the GUI. > > > > What is the value of this variable inside 'someconfdir' in the above test ? > > My topdirs variable is set to "./". It looks like the issue relates to > relative paths only. > > > Furthermore, additional args have always been ignored by recollindex if > > neither -i nor -e was set. I just checked that this was true of 1.17 > > > > Did you actually mean to type "-i some/path" in the above report ? > > Probably. I tried both with -i and without -i. The behaviour for the new > version would always be to only consider files below /tmp. > > Given the above I guess that my issue relates to recollindex having > added a call to chdir that was not present in the old version: > > http://sources.debian.net/src/recoll/1.20.3-2/index/recollindex.cpp/#L403 > > I am not sure whether the issue at hand is worth fixing at all or > whether I just need to update my configuration in a suitable way. > > Possibly the value of topdirs could be canonicalized using realpath > prior to invoking chdir? That's probably just the tip of the iceberg > though.
I think that you have explained everything, and found a an error-checking + doc bug. Relative paths in topdirs, should either be banned or be made absolute, not against the current directory, but against the configuration directory itself. You are right that the chdir() to /tmp is what put the problem in evidence. The reason for doing this is that some of the helper programs used by recoll have a tendancy to leave temporary files around, which is best done in /tmp. It's very weird that nobody ever hit this to this day... Even without the chdir(), the fact that the data being indexed depended on the cd was quite unsound (starting indexing from the wrong place would empty the index as I just saw...). Otoh, as paths are made absolute during indexing (against the current directory, both 1.17 and 1.20), search result preview/open would work from any location. All topdirs examples in the doc are with absolute paths, but there is nothing that explicitely bans relative paths. And the chdir has been in there for around 2 years, many people have run with it. 10 years of recoll and still surprises... So for the followup: - On your side, please use absolute paths inside recoll.conf. This is the workaround for now. - The next minor Recoll release will generate an error if relative paths are found in topdirs. - I am going to think a bit more about this. If confdir-relative paths can make sense in some circumstances (maybe they could have a use for removable media if I can make it work), I'll change the code to make it useful, but this is a big change, maybe in 1.21 If you can think of a good reason to keep relative paths against the current directory working, I am quite interested by your observations. In any case, thank you very much for tracking this out and finding the root cause. Cheers, jf -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
