Re: [Evolution] Funambol, syncing, etc.

[Chris G <cl isbd net>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 12:09:48PM +1100, Nick Jenkins wrote:
[Big snip of description of many/most of the paces I have been too]

> == General comments ==
>
> * This is not easy. Any attempt to pretend this is easy is incorrect. My
> grandma could not do this. My mother could not do this. Most normal
> people will simply not do this many steps. As soon as it requires using
> the command line, changing repositories, or anything like that, most
> normal people just won't do it.

Agree - I'm a command line junkie having used Unix based systems since
the early 1980s, but it needs some perseverence to get it working.


> * This is not quick. Any attempt to pretend this is quick is incorrect.
> Most people will give up long before spending this much time (58 minutes
> in my case) on getting it to work. Especially when the other methods are
> buggy, it makes you far less inclined to spend the time seeing if yet
> another method works, since you start to suspect it's an intractable
> problem.
> * The main solution to the above 2 problems, so I can't emphasise this
> enough: Please please please add Ubuntu packages for syncevolution and
> genesis-sync to the standard repositories. From what I understand,
> Fedora gets this right, and has packages. If "aptitude install
> syncevolution genesis-sync" had worked out-of-the-box, it would have
> saved a LOT of time, and made it much easier.
>
> == Bugs ==
>
> Having said all this, the Funambol method is still a little bit buggy /
> incomplete. I particularly notice this with addresses:
Supposedly using ScheduleWorld rather than myFunambol is better. 
However that really only points to the fact that different servers and
different clients may have different problems.


> * It doesn't seem to sync a contact's "other" address from evolution to
> the phone, as far as I can tell. In fact, it managed to delete an
> "other" address from one of my evolution contacts, probably after I
> modified the contact on the phone, and then the other address that I
> previously had in evolution ended up blank. I would personally prefer
> that syncing didn't delete my data :-)
> * If a contact has a home address in evolution, I sometimes seem to end
> up with both a straight "address" on the phone, and a "home
> address" (i.e. 2 addresses from 1). Then if I change the "home address",
> in evolution, the "home address" on the phone updates, but the "address"
> does not. ... but, if I delete the "address" on the phone, then the
> "home address" in evolution sometimes also gets deleted. So there's
> something odd going on here.
> * I have one contact that I edited multiple times on both the phone and
> in evolution, and then synced both (i.e. sync computer, sync phone, sync
> computer), so that it should all be in sync, but ended up with the
> address on the phone and the address on the computer out-of-sync (i.e.
> two different street addresses, yet syncing did not update either, and
> no warnings at either end about a conflict or being out-of-sync).
Different problems (in the main) from what I encountered but it's all
down to it being near impossible to translate one device's idea of
contact details to another client's view of the same thing.


> It's hard to know where these problems originate from, since there are
> so many different bits of software involved, - at least 5 by my count:
> Evolution <-> SyncEvolution <-> Genesis <-> Funambol <-> Nokia's sync
> software on the phone; and presumably there could be problems at any
> stage of that chain.
>
> So some problems, but overall it seems to work, and it does work better
> than the other methods I have tried, and once it's running, it seems
> extremely easy to use, both on the phone and on the computer.

-- 
Chris Green