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. We're in the process of migrating to git, but currently the master repo is hosted on subversion (known as SVN for short), with a read-only git mirror.

The repository includes a complete history of the code, including that from the original Open Muscat project's CVS repository. Additionally, we recreated copy and rename operations for historic commits (CVS doesn't support copy or rename directly). We dropped CVS tags for the old nightly snapshots (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 CVS tree.

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 the repository online:

Using Git

Currently this is a read-only mirror of our SVN repo, which 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. There's also a git mirror on repo.or.cz which updates by polling.

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

  1. git clone git://git.xapian.org/xapian
  2. Read the "Building from git" 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). Note that SVN tags appears as branches in git.

Using Subversion

We recommend using git now, as we're going to fully migrate away from SVN in the near future, but should you need to work with SVN in the meanwhile, here are the details:

  1. svn co svn://svn.xapian.org/xapian/trunk xapian
  2. Read the "Building from git" 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.

Snapshots

You can download automated snapshots, which are generated from git every 20 minutes, 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.