[vox] Dumped Ximian

[Karsten M. Self]

on Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 01:17:19PM -0800, Richard S. Crawford (rscrawford at mossroot.com) wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 December 2004 13:02, Rod Roark wrote:
> > On Wednesday 29 December 2004 12:25 pm, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> > > After a couple of years of joy with Ximian's evolution, I wound up
> > > dumping it this week after a botched sync using a buggy conduit
> > > ultimately ended up in me losing all of my calendar and task data from my
> > > Linux box, my Windows box, and my Clie.

> > > I've switched over to KDE 3.3.2 and Kontact on FC3.  KPilot syncs with my
> > > Clie perfectly every time.  I've been using KDE exclusively for a few
> > > days now, and I can't imagine why I ever preferred GNOME to it.
> >
> > I also prefer KDE, but we probably owe the googlers a bit
> > more than "if you use Gnome your house will burn down".
> > What was the nature of the problem?
> 
> Well, more specifically, the problem was this:
> 
> I upgraded FC2 to FC3 on my box.  FC3 came with Ximian (Novell?)
> Evolution 2.0.2.  I enabled all of the conduits, double-checked my USB
> settings and upgraded UDEV to avoid the bugs that had been reported.
> Then I clicked Sync on my Clie, and things went fine the first time.

Know, and learn, and love:  the distinction between "sync" (coordinate
any differences between PDA and PC versions of data) and "backup" (take
everything on PDA and store to PC disk.

A sync, as the name suggests, just syncronizes deltas.  It's somewhat
destructive of local state.  A backup ideally creates a new copy of full
current PDA state.  Read your tools docs to understand how many copies
it maintains, naming convention, etc.  File bugs if clarity is anything
less than crystal.

You want to make backups pretty frequently -- every day or two isn't
excessive.  Over USB, you're talking a minute or so.

Note that pilot-xfer (which you've mentioned) does this, and lets you
name the backup file.  I like to do something like:

    pilot-xfer -b Palm/bu-$( date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S ).$$

...which is pretty much assured to be unique.  It's also timestamped,
and sorts in a directory listing.  If you don't like typing all that,
write an alias, shell script, or $DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT shortcut.

 
> The next time I tried it, however, the conduit created an extraneous
> 6,000 blank To-Do's.  

Gross application bug.  Did you file one?

> Yes, 6,000.  I could not delete them from Evolution without Evolution
> freezing on me 

FWIW:  pilot-xfer can list, and delete, records on your PDA.  I'm not
sure it's atomicity reaches the level of individual entries in a
database though, and suspect it doesn't.

[Much more woe elided]

> I've since found that there is a utility in pilot-xfer which can
> delete duplicate entries on the Clie, but I didn't know about that at
> the time.  I've also found reports of several other people who've had
> exactly the same issue with the duplicated ToDo entries on different
> models of PDA's, and there's no word from Novell about whether this is
> a known bug (I looked in their BugZilla database and found no entry,
> so I created one).

Ah.  Good.

rawhide++
 
> That was when I decided to switch to KDE and Kontact.  :)

;-)

I've found KDE's a bit more sane in some regards than GNOME, though I've
also had some ugly experiences.  KNode, for example, not bothering to
save state until you exit the application.  Cleanly.  <coff>

As for PDAs:  jpilot is a very nice, workable, GUI app.  Though I don't
do email/contact integration, have heard good things about KDE's
groupware.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    Soon ripe, soon rotten.
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