tomboy notes creates duplicate notes with the same title

[k singh]

I am using ubuntu 14.04 and tomboy 1.15.4. Over a period of time(since 2006) I have been upgrading ubuntu and tomboy notes and had accumulated a large number of .note files-- some moved over from previous installations of ubuntu as i learnt to use ubuntu and save the data. Recently i tried to backup the notes to plain text or html and was not successful as the application created some folders but stopped in between creating some files/subfolders (for notebooks) or none at all--giving an unknown error. So i copied all the .note files in ~/.local/share/tomboy to a single text file as backup. Then quit tomboy notes and deleted all the .note files in the folder. After doing a grep search on the text file for <title> , i came across multiple notes with the same name--which may be the cause of the inability to backup/export to html or plain text--and was giving an unknown error. It could also be the reason why tomboy notes crashes or closes unexpectedly. Now i am painfully trying to rebuild the entire data as it was structured earlier--hopefully a lot of junk will be cleaned up.

Why Tomboy notes is not doing strict checks during creation of new node/note or during the process of replacing/changing the name of an old node/note needs to be looked into. Due to multiple notes with the same name, indexing fails and the program crashes. Also since the filename of the .note files is not human friendly and has no correlation with the title of the note, when previously saved .note files are merged into the same directory as the new .note files, there is a possibility that same title notes are introduced mistakenly without being noticed by the application which could be causing the unexpected problems.

So there are 3 processes by which same title notes are coming into being
1 During creation of new notes -because of not being able to cover all the possibilities--maybe unlikely
2 During updation/renaming of older notes during usual process of editing and use
3 during saving or backing up from previous versions or folders of different computers--synchronisation problems--or merging problems etc