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 which runs on Subversion (known as SVN for short.)

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 - these can still be used in the now frozen Xapian CVS tree - see below.) 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).

To get the very latest version of Xapian 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.

You can also get the latest Search::Xapian (Perl bindings for Xapian) development sources like so:

  1. svn co svn://svn.xapian.org/search-xapian Search_Xapian
  2. You can configure Search::Xapian to build against xapian installed in a non-standard place like so:

    XAPIAN_CONFIG=/path/to/xapian/xapian-core/xapian-config perl Makefile.PL

Snapshots

We plan to set up an automatic snapshot system which will try to compile and run the library testsuite every night, and upload a snapshot if all tests pass. This is not currently operational, but you can download completely untested snapshots, which are generated once an hour (so long as the code in SVN isn't too broken for even make dist to work).

The snapshots are built automatically on various different platforms - you can view the results of these builds in our tinderbox and also MinGW and MSVC build in buildbot.

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.