Re: [Evolution] Problems with Contacts (and Calendar) in Evolution version 3.32.4

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Thu, 2019-08-15 at 12:15 +0200, Karl-Heinz Krämer wrote:
> First, I had transferred both from Mozilla Thunderbird to Personal
> but they often crashed.

        Hi,
how did you transfer them? Through the Import wizard, or manually by
copying files, or...

> I think I could solve the problem with the Calendar after I copied it
> to a new Calendar named KH besides the Personal one. It still crashes
> sometimes but very rarely. ...
>
> But the Contact list generally crashed after starting the Evolution
> program even though I have built it completely new.

When you say 'built', do you mean like recompiled the evolution(-data-
server) sources, or deleting underlying data files of evolution(-data-
server) and let it recreate them from scratch?

Let's start with the crashes, the other things can be just because of
that, thus it'll be better to figure out that first. Could you install
debuginfo packages for evolution-data-server (and ideally also
evolution itself and possibly glib2), please? It'll help to show where
the crash happened. Once you've it installed, you can run the
background factories from a terminal like this:

   $ gdb /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory --ex "r -w" \
       --ex "t a a bt" --ex q

and couple seconds later run the other factory:

   $ gdb /usr/libexec/evolution-calendar-factory --ex "r -w" \
       --ex "t a a bt" --ex q

Both commands run them and when they stop, possibly due to the crash,
they print where it happened and will quit gdb. The interesting part is
not where the backtraces starts, but also few lines above it, which can
contain a message, some kind of runtime warning or assertion, which can
explain why the program had been aborted. The actual path where the
factories are stored can differ in your distribution.

Before uploading both backtraces anywhere, make sure they do not
contain anything private. It can be passwords, email addresses, server
addresses and so on. I usually search for "pass" at least (quotes for
clarity only).

> The error messages are as follows:
> ...

You can select the error message and copy it anywhere, instead of using
images. The "bold text" and "non-bold text" are two separate parts,
thus they can be selected only separately, but otherwise the copy&paste
works on it.

As the errors can be caused by the crashes I'd rather skip them for now
(usually factory crash has slightly different error messages).

> The files in my home folder .var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/data are as
> follows:

Hmm, is that about Evolution in Flatpak? The host system uses
~/.local/share/evolution/ and similar directories usually. If it's
Flatpak, is it from Flathub or from elsewhere? And if it's Flatpak,
then the gdb commands I provided above won't work, because the Flatpak
version runs its own factories (if the Flathub version is used).

> Another problem in this context is that I did not find a way to save
> the Contact list and the Calendar independent of the rest of the
> program, so that I could install Evolution completely new.

It's easy with On This Computer contacts and calendars (and task lists
and memo lists, to be complete). Even easier with Calendar (and tasks
list and memo lists), you can simply copy the calendar.ics file (as in
the path your screen shot shows) and import it into any program, which
supports .ics format. Evolution allows that too, it's in File->Import-
> Single file->.....

When things work, you can right-click respective Address book,
Calendar, ... in the GUI and pick in the context menu "Save as", which
will save the book, calendar,... content into a standard format (.vcf
for books, .ics for calendars/memos/tasks).

As the factories are crashing for you, you can extract the contact data
from their contacts.db file (as you found it on disk) with this
command:

   $ sqlite3 ~/.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system/contacts.db \
       "SELECT vcard FROM folder_id" >vcards.vcf

which saves all the contacts into the vcards.vcf file, which can be
imported anywhere where the .vcf format is recognized (similar as with
the calendar.ics file). There are not inlined photos for the contacts,
they are left on the disk (they are saved in the 'photos' directory
beside the contacts.db file). It seems you do not have any photos set,
according to your directory listing, thus it might not be a problem.

Hope it helps.

        Bye,
        Milan