Re: [Evolution] downgrade, fetch mail, upgrade --> mail gets deleted

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Tue, 2013-04-02 at 05:57 +0200, ChO₂ wrote: 
> Hello everybody,
> I just ran into the following issue:
> I downgraded from evolution 3.4.4-2 to 2.30.3-5. As a result, all of my
> mails, my filter rules and the content of my signatures were gone.

Expected.  

> I wasn't worried at this point because I was sure that moving back to
> 3.4.4-2 would bring my mail back. Before I did that, I went to fetching
> new mail and reading it.
> When I finally upgraded to v3, my old mail actually reappeared - but now
> the mail that I had fetched using v2 was gone. And this time, "gone"
> means deleted, not invisible.
> Fortunately, I had somehow sensed that something like this might happen
> so I had made a backup to restore and import the lost messages from.

Yea, you now have two versions lying about.  The automatic-upgrade can't
have any idea what to do with that;  it can't merge the bits you
accumulated in your old 2.x data into what remains of your 3.4 data - it
already did the 2.x -> 3.4 upgrade and then YOU went back and added more
bits to the 2.x data. 

Evolution did not delete anything.

> For me, everything went well, but WHY does evolution delete my messages?

Evolution did not delete your messages, you did.  Or you at least made
them 'unfindable'.

You can possibly import the MBox files from the 2.x folders into 3.4 -
they should still be there, I assume;  I can't see any reason that
wouldn't work, it will just be a manual process.  But Evolution did not
delete anything.  You just need to find the 2.x MBox files,  2.x is a
very long time ago and I can't remember where they were [ ~/.evolution
maybe? ].  But Evolution did not delete anything.

Evolution did not delete anything.

> You can't expect the user to foresee that this is going to happen; 

A "user" isn't expected to upgrade, downgrade, upgrade; and do so across
major version changes.  Try that with just about any application, it
won't work.

Evolution did not delete anything.

> Most users don't have the divine gift of prophecy and those who do don't use
> Evolution because they think it doesn't work.

Argh!  People do *crazy* stuff, and blame the software?  [speaking as
someone who is constantly baffled at what people are doing slinging
application versions around, mucking about in dot files and folders,
restoring and moving random chunks of their home directories, sheeesh...
just stop doing that stuff].   And above all else - stop blaming the
software.

Is the biggest problem with Desktop LINUX that a significant portion of
its users refuse to treat it like a desktop platform?  They need someone
standing by to slap there hands every time they fiddle with something in
vi.  I do fault the distributions a bit here - they should build a "just
say no" policy into their package managers, and remove all "--force"
options.  If you need those who have chosen a dark path, it is going to
break;  those options should only work with a
--i-am-a-developer-and-accept-full-responsibility-for-the-consequences-of-my-choice-and-will-not-post-any-messages-blaming-anyone-or-anything-else
 option, possibly specified three times.

Life is much easier if you just stay reasonably current through the
normal update process and move with tide.  Perhaps people are terrified
about upgrade/updates as they were sometimes quite painful a decade ago.
These days it is very smooth,  like an update is
insert-disc->reboot->click-a-few-things->reboot->resume-work.  Really.
I've done online update of openSUSE from 11.3->11.4->12.1->12.2->12.3,
no trauma.  Back to work.  I even dropped GNOME 3.6 [and Evolution 3.6!
YAY, BIG STEP FORWARD! GREAT WORK GUYS!] on 12.2 from a repo and moved
onto 12.3... no drama.   But if you hang out with no updates for 5+
years... yeah, updates will be traumatic.  I'm sorry - but DUHH!   THAT
IS NOT THE SOFTWARE'S FAULT.  THE SOFTWARE WORKS GREAT - when used in an
expected / normal / sane way.

If you are still hanging out on an NT4 domain, install Windows 2008 and
try migrating your domain.... FAIL!  Microsoft will tell you:  "Uh?
Really?  That is not longer supported." That is the vintage jump we are
talking about here.  In-place upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 8?
In-place upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.x to PostgreSQL 9.x? You are advised
to backup before trying that.  Upgrade from Access 97 to Access 2010?
That will look like it worked... for a little while;  then you start the
triage.