Re: [Evolution] Have I pushed Evolution beyond where it is designed to go?

[Ralf Mardorf <silver bullet zoho com>]

On Mon, 2022-11-14 at 13:08 -0500, Paul Smith wrote:
> The nice thing about flatpak is it's quite simple to install an older
> version (e.g., Evolution 3.44) if that's helpful to you.

Hi,

it was pointed out several times that Evolution downgrades are sometimes
a problem regarding the user data/settings. Downgrades of any software
can suffer from this issues. Sometimes user data/settings are
transformed by an update to a different format and can become
incompatible for usage with older versions. IOW unless it's not verified
that the user data/settings are backwards compatible or a backup of
compatible formatted user data is available, it doesn't matter how easy
or hard the downgrade of the software itself is.

I don't know if data/settings used with 3.46 do work without issues when
using 3.44. Much likely there's no issue with emails and if needed
settings can be reset to defaults by the gsettings command. Likely the
worst case is to redo the settings.

Resume, downgrading this kind of containerized software is easier to do
for bloated software, than for the same software with a huge shared
dependency tree, but the container approach doesn't solve user
data/settings backwards incompatibility.

Flatpaks and similar approaches make some things easier for users, but
other things harder and they even don't solve all existing problems
related to upgrades and downgrades.

Regards,
Ralf