Apparently my previous version of Darktable was so old it used database version 1. This seems to be a problem for Darktable 3.0.2. When I try to run it I get…
[defaults] found a 64-bit system with 8049812 kb ram and 4 cores (0 atom based)
[defaults] setting high quality defaults
[init] can't prepare insertion of used tags into data database
[init] table data.tags has no column named icon
[init] database `library.db' couldn't be upgraded from version 1 to 21. aborting
ERROR : cannot open database
It looks like my database is so old it doesn’t have columns for things that the new Darktable expects. Does anybody know if there any scripts available to upgrade the database version manually to a point where latest Darktable would be happy? Or failing that what the minimal set of intermediate upgrades (i.e. installing intermediate versions of Darktable, opening the database, then repeating) would be?
Turns out it was my fault. I was using an incomplete backup of my .config/darktable directory. Trying again with a full backup worked fine (I was on Darktable 1.4.2 before). Seems the actual problem was that library.db was present but data.db wasn’t. I guess a slightly more informative error message might have helped, but fundamentally it was my fault!!
I have the same problem going from 12 to 34 (don’t remember the old version, but the new one is 3.8). In my case, data.db-pro-3.8.0 is 0 bytes. The upgrade creates a new data.db at 49152, but still fails with the “no column named icon” message.
I had no trouble opening the old version before the upgrade. I was able to launch Darktable after renaming the .config/darktable directory to force it to create a new DB.