[GRLUG] Can't upgrade to Fedora 17

[Eric Beversluis]

On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 14:10 -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 13:38 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 05:55 -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote: 
> > > Update: I was able to complete the upgrade from the Fedora 17 live cd. A
> > > real hassle, though, needing to do a fresh install. Evolution in
> > > particular is a pain. After restoring my home directory, I opened
> > > Evolution, which then proceeded, as nearly as I can tell, with
> > > overwriting my old Evo data in .local/share/evolution. So I had to
> > > re-copy all of that manually. A real pain, particularly when Evo didn't
> > > want to recognize my calendar and contacts. I finally got it to
> > > recognize the calendar stuff by using the Import Individual File option,
> > > selecting the calendar.ics that was already in ...evolution/calendar. 
> > 
> > > Does anyone know what I can do to get my contacts re-installed? I think
> > > maybe Evo switched from some other DB format to SQLite. But how do I
> > > convert the old addressbook.db?
> > 
> > Yes, Evolution changed quite some time ago to use the XDG spec for
> > storing data.  It (along with everyone else) also left BDB in favor of
> > SQLite.
> > <http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.2/data-storage.html.en>
> > 
> > But an upgrade does not overwrite data, as the data gets recreates in a
> > different place.  The evolution@ list is probably a good place to ask.
> > <https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list>
> 
> Unfortunately, as I learned last year, the people on the list are pretty
> snotty about helping anyone who doesn't have an official Evo backup and
> relied instead on an rdiff-backup. (<rant> E.g., they said, "Of course,
> you're not supposed to be messing with hidden file anyway."--First time
> I head that in 10 years of working with Linux. And I don't think I've
> seen any other application that requires you to use their backup and
> doesn't maintain backward compatibility with older file formats. There's
> certainly nothing in the help documents that informs the user of this.
> </rant>)
> 
> I thought I had muddled through last year and gotten everything sorted
> out, but apparently the contacts files did not get updated and so now I
> need a way to convert the old addressbook.db to the new sqlite format.
> 
> EB
> 
Solution:
Work-around:
-I spent several hrs trying to find way to convert the BDB file to
SQLite, without success (or at least, without finding anything that
didn't look like it had a significant learning curve).
-I copied the old addressbook.db file to an old computer that had an old
Evo.
-I used that evo to save the addressbook to vCard format.
-I imported the list.vcf into the new Evo on the Fedora 17 box

Thanks to all.