Re: [Evolution] Bugs in birthday handling

[Bram Mertens <bram-mertens linux be>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 13:09 +0530, Sandip Bhattacharya wrote: 
> On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 02:32 +0530, Sandip Bhattacharya wrote:
> > b. If I set the birthday for a contact who is already in the addressbook
> > (but didnt have the birthday set previously), then the birthday doesnt
> > show up in the birthdays and anniversary. Well ... that is what I
> > thought. But actually it is getting set ... only on the day the person
> > was born. i.e. if the person was born in 1976, it shows up in the
> > calendar of that year ONLY. 
> > So this is pretty weird. Does the birthday field stand for the persons
> > upcoming birthday or the day he/she was born?
>
> Can anyone confirm this behavior in FC3, so that I can file it as a bug?
> Or alternatively, can someone point out any mistake in my usage?

I have noticed this and some other peculiarities on debian testing.

Today I added several contacts to my address book, and I added the
birthday of several contacts as well. Most of them show up fine [1] but
for some contacts the birthday only shows up in the year of birth as
described by Sandip.

I have been adding several contacts in order to test this and have
"succeeded" in adding a contact whose birthday doesn't show up in the
calendar at all...
Here are the steps I took:
1. I copied and pasted one of my test contacts,
2. choose to add the contact in the dialog box warning about the
duplicate contact,
3. edited the contact's name but didn't edit the birthday
4. opened the calendar and noticed the missing birthday

Afterward I added another test contact without copying and the birthday
appeared without a problem...

When I save the contact as a vcard and then delete the contact and
import the vcard again the birthday shows up fine...

Another thing I noticed is that as soon as the birthday of a contact is
entered any anniversary entered for that contact no longer shows up on
the calendar. Is this intentional?

Again I added a contact to test this and noticed that this contacts
anniversary and birthday now appear on the contact's birthday!
1. Added a new contact with anniversary: 29/12/2003
2. opened the calendar on 29/12/2003: the anniversary was shown
correctly
3. opened the calendar on 29/12/2004: the anniversary was repeated
correctly
4. edited the contact: added a birthday: 30/12/2003
5. opened the calendar on 29/12/2003: the anniversary had disappeared
6. opened the calendar on 30/12/2003: the anniversary AND birthday were
BOTH shown on this day
7. opened the calendar on 29/12/2004 and 30/12/2004: the anniversary and
birthday are both displayed on 30/12/2004
8. re-opened the contact to check it wasn't a user error but the
anniversary is set to 29/12/2003 and the birthday to 30/12/2003 as
expected...

saving the contact as vcard, deleting and importing doesn't help like it
does in the "missing birthday scenario"...

What confuses me most is that the behavior isn't the same for all
contacts...

I start evolution from a script with:
CAMEL_VERBOSE_DEBUG=1 evolution >> $LOGFILE 2>&1

But I don't see anything in this logfile that looks promising. If
someone wants to have a look at it let me know and I'll send it
off-list.

Is there anything else that I can do to help debug this?

[1] although I had to disable/re-enable the "Birthdays and
Anniversaries" option on some occasions.
-- 
# Mertens Bram "M8ram"   <bram-mertens linux be>   Linux User #349737 #
# debian testing            kernel 2.6.8-1-686     i686     512MB RAM #
# 22:20:37 up 10 days, 22:45,  8 users,  load average: 0.18, 0.33, 0.34 #