Re: [Evolution] bug during transition from V2 to V3

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 14:07 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > Size of the mailstore
> > * I'm not sure of the mailstore location. Here is what I currently have on
> > disk :
> > $ du -ms .local/share/evolution/mail/ .config/evolution/mail/
> > 3500    .local/share/evolution/mail/
> > 2       .config/evolution/mail/
>
> That's not very big so it doesn't look like the source of the problem. I
> would say the process has almost certainly hung (functionally if not
> literally) and it might be time to just kill it.

        Hi,
I guess it's that small, because the conversion failed. Your emails can
be still stored at ~/.evolution. I'd say the conversion is broken if it
doesn't finish within an hour, depending on actual mailbox size (100k
messages might be converted within 10 minutes, I'd guess). I'd expect
that your 3.10.4 will handle the conversion gracefully, I recall some
fixes landed before that version.

> .....
>
> I meant to save your current mboxes to a different folder and set up
> your accounts again. You can then import old email from the saved mbox
> files.
>
> ....

I agree with this. If your evolution denies to convert on its own, then
slap it, move away (do not delete!) all the folders:
   ~/.evolution
   ~/.local/share/evolution
   ~/.config/evolution
   ~/.cache/evolution
and start from scratch [1]. After that you can configure a new "Standard
Unix mbox spool directory" account and point it either to the renamed
   ~/.evolution/mail/local
and/or to renamed
   ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local
which you can then copy under On This Computer folders, if needed.

Bigger issue is with local addressbooks and calendar. Those are stored
under ~/.evolution/addressbook/system and ~/.evolution/calendar/system
(and similar for 'tasks' and 'memos'). Ideal would be if you can still
boot the old machine and "Save as vCard"/"Save as iCalendar" the
books/calendar/... you care about and import them on the new machine, as
Patrick suggested.

Any other playing with internal evolution files may cause trouble (the
other option is to replace the files on the disk, with
evolution-calendar-factory and evolution-addressbook-factory processes
stopped, which is not that easy under gnome-shell, if you use it).

        Bye,
        Milan

[1] To fully start from scratch you might also cleanup /apps/evolution
in GConf tree (unset values in gconf-editor). Of course, any playing
with internal evolution files expects no evolution related processes
running (`ps ax | grep evolution` may return only one entry, the 'grep'
command).