Bleeding Edge

If you want a stable version of Xapian, we recommend using a released version. But if you're happy to cope with potential breakage and want to try the latest development code, or do development yourself, you can access our version control system. Currently this runs on Subversion (known as SVN for short), with a read-only Git mirror.

The Subversion repository includes a complete history of the code, including that from the original Open Muscat project (when converting to SVN we dropped old nightly snapshot tags and a few others which it seems highly unlikely anyone would find useful - if you really need these for some reason, contact us for a copy of the archived Xapian CVS tree.) Additionally, we've recreated copy and rename operations into the Subversion history (CVS doesn't support copy or rename directly.)

Access Details

Note: If you just want to look at the history of a few files, you may find it easier and quicker to browse our SVN repository online (using trac) (or using viewvc).

Using Subversion

To get the very latest version of Xapian (including the Search::Xapian Perl bindings) from our repository, follow these steps:

  1. svn co svn://svn.xapian.org/xapian/trunk xapian
  2. Read the "Building from SVN" section in xapian-core/HACKING - in particular make sure you have the required tools installed.
  3. In the newly created xapian directory, run the command ./bootstrap - this will run various developer tools to produce a source tree like you'd get from unpacking release source tarballs.
  4. bootstrap will create a top level configure script, which you can use to configure the whole source tree together.
  5. If you're looking to do development work on Xapian, then the rest of xapian-core/HACKING is recommended reading.

Using Git

We have a read-only git mirror of the SVN repository. This is updated automatically in response to commits to SVN, so should be at most a few minutes behind.

There are also mirrors on gitorious.org and github which you will probably find more convenient to clone from if you use those sites. These are updated by the same system which updates git.xapian.org, so should be very current.

Check out like so (assuming you're using git.xapian.org):

  1. git clone git://git.xapian.org/xapian
  2. Read the "Building from SVN" section in xapian-core/HACKING - in particular make sure you have the required tools installed.
  3. In the newly created xapian directory, run the command ./bootstrap - this will run various developer tools to produce a source tree like you'd get from unpacking release source tarballs.
  4. bootstrap will create a top level configure script, which you can use to configure the whole source tree together.
  5. If you're looking to do development work on Xapian, then the rest of xapian-core/HACKING is recommended reading.

All branches should be available via git (you can list them with git branch -r) and new branches and tags should get added automatically now.

Snapshots

You can download automated snapshots, which are generated once an hour, provided make distcheck passes on Linux. This means that some breakages are avoided, but they may still fail to build for you if you're using a different platform, or even a different version of Linux.

If you want to get a better idea of how healthy the tree is on various platforms, see the automated builds page on the wiki.

CVS

Prior to April 2005 we used CVS as our version control system. The SVN tree contains the full history, except some useless really old tags weren't converted. The (now frozen) Xapian CVS tree is preserved, but not currently accessible online.