Xapian discuss - Feb 2011 - libxapian1.2.4 breaks synaptic quick search; breaks software centre search

[Cc-ing xapian-discuss as other people may be able to help]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 11:45:20PM +0000, francis wrote:
> I installed xapian1.2.4 on Lucid; libxapian1.2.4 seems to be
> incompatible with synaptic quick search - typing two or more chars
> produces a segmentation fault. The synaptic search(find) button works
> ok. Software Centre search is also broken.
I guess you're using packages from my PPA?

Lucid comes with Xapian 1.0.18-1, which means libxapian15, while Xapian
1.2.x is libxapian22, so for C++ code they should quietly coexist.  So
it's odd that synaptic fails.  If you run it under gdb, where does it
segfault?  ("bt" in gdb after the segfault will give a backtrace).

I can see that software centre (which is written in python) will
probably break if you also installed python-xapian 1.2.x - software
centre needed some changes to fix uses of deprecated features in Xapian
1.0 which were removed in Xapian 1.2.

If you're using packaged versions, you can check which python-xapian
version you have with:

dpkg -l python-xapian

There's not much I can do about that I'm afraid, short of backporting
fixes for all the python packages which were using deprecated features,
which I don't have time for I'm afraid.  Someone else may have
backported a new enough version to be Xapian 1.2 compatible though.

Cheers,
    Olly