Upcoming breaking file format changes

[Tobias Leupold]

E-Mail von Johannes Zarl-Zierl vom Dienstag, 22. April 2025, 22:39:
> 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!

At the moment, the brave of you can try the compressed_rework_tidied branch ;-)

> Cheers,
>   Johannes
> 
> [477533] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477533