Upcoming breaking file format changes

Johannes Zarl-Zierl johannes at zarl-zierl.at
Tue Apr 22 21:39:52 BST 2025


Hi!

TL/DR: upcoming index.xml changes are not backwards compatible. Have a backup 
ready and see if you can find any bugs.

Long version:

With the current version 10 of the index.xml file format has some problems when 
using the "compressed" file format. Namely, it turns out the escaping function 
that we used to convert arbitrary category names into safe strings for use in 
XML attribute names has some corner cases that were not expected. (see bug 
[477533] for an example).

Tobias and I now have implemented a proper fix for the situation in the 
upcoming version 11 of the index.xml file format (well, mostly Tobias took 
initiative and I tried breaking his code).

The gist:

If you're using the "uncompressed" file format, things work like before.

If you're using the "compressed" file format (as we recommend you do), category 
names are no longer used as XML attributes, and numeric category ids are used 
in their place (e.g. "tags_1"). With the new file format, tagged areas are also 
stored within the attribute and not in a partially uncompressed format as 
before. That means if you use this feature a lot, your index.xml may have a 
reduced size.

The version 11 file "compressed" format is not backwards compatible to the 
version 10 "compressed" file format!


What does that mean for you?

We are about to merge the new file format into master. Please make sure to back 
up your current database file, and see if something breaks.
There is a big warning message right at the start of kphotoalbum for now, so 
that you don't accidentally save your database in the wrong version of 
kphotoalbum.

Please try  the new version and report back any bugs that you may find!

Cheers,
  Johannes

[477533] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477533
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