Re: [Evolution] Synchronizing desktop and laptop

[Michael Ekstrand <michael elehack net>]

On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 22:16 +0100, Patrick Ohly wrote:
> I just saw your email in the Gmane archive. If I had been subscribed I
> would have replied earlier. Well, better late than never...
>
> Michael Ekstrand wrote:
> > I've also tried SyncEvolution and ScheduleWorld, but that continually
> > wrecked my evolution address book displays as it stripped all evolution
> > custom data from the vcard's and Evolution was therefore unhappy.
>
> There are some known limitations due to the fact that ScheduleWorld
> stores the contacts in an LDAP scheme which is less capable than vCard.
> They are listed on the SyncEvolution compatibility page ("does not
> distinguish between different emails", "the order of email addresses and
> phone numbers in the Evolution GUI is not preserved").
>
> Are these the problems that made it unusable for you? If yes, then I
> guess we need to lobby Mark to extend the LDAP scheme, if no, then you
> might have found an unknown problem and I'd be very interested to hear
> more about it.

If I remember correctly, that was the most significant issue.  I think
there's probably some things that Evolution could be doing better; I
think that it should assume some reasonable defaults to allow
information to at least be visible when it can't find its custom
properties.  But the destruction of custom properties rendered it so
that I could not view the phone numbers for a contact in Evolution until
I edited and re-saved the contact.  Further, I believe it reset this
data even on the computer from which I initialized ScheduleWorld.

I did play with the SyncEvolution source in an attempt to make it set up
some default display properties when it saved a contact; this wound up
not working.

I think some of the rest of the issue was connected with the inability
for SyncML to neatly pick up on deleted fields - I wound up with
duplicated phone numbers when I was trying to do some initial testing.
And I'd seen the SyncEvolution/ScheduleWorld combo as a hack to
accomplish what I wanted - ideally, I wouldn't need something like
ScheduleWorld to keep these two computers in sync.

But yeah, I believe the lost Evo data was the biggest problem.  If a
workaround for that could be developed so that my address book remained
usable, it seems like SyncEvolution would do the job, at least until the
ideal solution (a disconnectable, networked backing store for e-d-s, or
the conduit project developing all the features I need) becomes
available.


- Michael