Empty nodes coordinates in ways OPL output with locations_on_ways=true

[flacombe]

What version of osmium-tool are you using?

I encounter this problem with the following versions

Debian Bullseye
osmium version 1.13.1
libosmium version 2.16.0
Supported PBF compression types: none zlib lz4

updated to

Debian Trixie
osmium version 1.18.0
libosmium version 2.22.0
Supported PBF compression types: none zlib lz4

What operating system version are you using?

Debian Bullseye and Debian Trixie

Tell us something about your system

8 CPU / 32 Go RAM / 2 To SSD

What did you do exactly?

I applied the follwing commands on the planet history file:

osmium tags-filter history-latest.osm.pbf -R w/power=line,cable -O -o history-interm.osh.pbf
osmium getid -H -r -t history-latest.osm.pbf  -I history-interm.osh.pbf -o history-useful.osh.pbf
osmium time-filter history-useful.osh.pbf 2024-10-01T00:00:00Z 2025-09-22T00:00:02Z -f opl,history=true,locations_on_ways=true -o features-lines.opl

What did you expect to happen?

I expected to get nodes members coordinates in the output OPL in the N field (nIDxLONGITUDEyLATITUDE) for selected ways.

What did happen instead?

I'm getting an incomplete OPL output like:

cat features-lines.opl | grep n13160885753
n1316088575 v1 dV c172268459 t2025-09-21T22:49:43Z i56597 uOberaffe T x84.1388664 y37.7405636
w1431824928 v1 dV c172268459 t2025-09-21T22:49:43Z i56597 uOberaffe Tcables=3,power=line Nn13160885754xy,n13160885753xy,n13160885752xy,n13160885751xy,n13160885750xy,n13160885749xy,n13160885748xy,n13160885747xy,n13160885746xy,n13160885745xy,n13160885744xy,n13160885743xy,n13160885742xy,n13160885741xy,n13160885740xy

As node is available in the OPL file, coordinates were expected to be shown beside x and y.

What did you do to try analyzing the problem?

I've upgrade from osmium 1.13.1 (Debian Bullseye) to osmium 1.18.0 (Debian Trixie)
I checked the commands and documentation, existing issues in this repo but didn't found anything relevant yet.

[flacombe]

After further thinking on this, it may be related to #295 as some of my procesing steps could lead to loss of nodes coordinates while I wasn't aware of.

I could be able to extract nodes ids list and coordinates to mix them in an SQL table but being able to get coordinates out of OPL saves me so much time that I'm willing to investigate a bit more.

[joto]

You can't just set locations_on_ways=true as output format. This will just set the flag in the output file that there are locations on ways, not set the actual locations on all the ways. For that you need to use osmium add-locations-to-ways. But that doesn't work with history files.

[flacombe]

Thank you for this relevant comment, I've completely skipped this step.
I will investigate about this.

But that doesn't work with history files.

Will it completely fail or will it use bad coordinates for instance, if I provide an OSH as input?
To me, and I may mistook something here, I would find fair to always use nodes' last version from the input OSH file for instance.

[joto]

Will it completely fail or will it use bad coordinates for instance, if I provide an OSH as input?

Not sure at the moment. It will either complain that you have a history file and refuse to work or it will do something which might or might not be useful. No guarantees.

[flacombe]

I understand, so I won't rely on it for now, thanks.

It would had saved me some time at short term to get ways geometries but I also have needs to access to referenced nodes anyway so from my perspective that's not highly necessary to add this support in osmium.
I will get both ways and referenced nodes in OPL output and make the match with the nodes list for each way afterwards.

[flacombe]

By the way, another questions come to my mind: I understand the gathering of nodes coordinates is not supported for history file.

How does it work for something like osmium tags-filter R w/highway=secondary history.osh.pbf -o output.opl.pbf (without --omit-referenced)?
Will it extract all available versions of referenced features without further selection?

Is the selection of the proper nodes versions depending on each way version's time span the only difficulty for osmium add-locations-to-ways that explains the lack of support?

[joto]

How does it work for something...

It doesn't. The man page of osmium tags-filter explicitly mentions that you need --omit-referenced for it to work with history files.

Is the selection of the proper nodes versions...

That is definitely the main problem, but not the only one. Once you take relations into account it all becomes even more complicated.

Generally osmium supports history data in all its commands as long as that's reasonably easy to do, well-defined and without extra overhead. But supporting history data is often much more effort than non-history data (as you have found out by now), so it is not done everywhere and that's usually not something that's easily fixed, otherwise we'd done it before.

[flacombe]

I agree, indeed!

I would better accumulate every node referenced in N field for every way I select and then get all versions with osmium getid to link them according to dates in SQL.