Status: IN
The WAL binary format is simultaneously inflexible and fragile: contiguous record packing with no block alignment prevents resync after mid-file corruption, signed 32-bit length fields theoretically admit negative values with no guard, and there is no version field — a format change invalidates all existing WAL files with no migration path and no way to distinguish old-format from new-format records.
Format blocks both corruption recovery (no block boundaries) and evolution (no version field)
Depends on (SL): wal-contiguous-no-block-alignment, wal-key-value-length-signed-int32, wal-format-change-breaks-compatibility