Reporter: jbr
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 5.12pm, Friday, 4th February 2011]

Application of the parameter omitmetadata=true in the write-pbf task sets the 'version' attribute of an processed entity to -1. When trying to write such an entity to an !ObjectStore (e.g. !SimpleObjectStore) the version attribute is casted from an integer type to a char in method org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.util.!IntAsChar.intToChar(). A negative number obviously cannot be casted to a char and so an !OsmosisRuntimeException is thrown.

I could set the version attribute to a valid value prior to storing it in an !ObjectStore. However, that's only possible if the entity is not readonly. Otherwise I have to clone the entity, which is not very memory efficient in an Osmosis pipe with much parallelization (e.g. --tee 20).

The easiest and I guess most reasonable fix to this problem would be to write a '0' instead of '-1' to the version attribute in the --write-pbf task when omitmetadata is enabled.