[SyncEvolution] SyncEvolution 1.5.1 released
by Patrick Ohly
About SyncEvolution
===================
SyncEvolution synchronizes personal information management (PIM) data
via various protocols (SyncML, CalDAV/CardDAV, ActiveSync). It syncs
contacts, appointments, tasks and memos. It syncs to web services or to
SyncML-capable phones via Bluetooth.
Binaries are available for Linux desktops (using GNOME Evolution, or
KDE's Akonadi), for Maemo (Nokia N900, N9) and Sailfish OS (Jolla
phone).
About 1.5.1
===========
Maintenance release. Binaries now also get compiled for Debian 8.0
"Jessie".
Details:
* avoid time zone issue with Funambol server
The Funambol iCalendar 2.0 parser fails to handle time zones
with quotation marks around the TZID value, which is something
that SyncEvolution started to add in 1.4.99.3. While it is valid
to quote like that, it is not necessary, so avoid quoting in
this case to restore interoperability.
* syncevo-http-server: stop using deprecated twisted.web.error (FDO #90419)
This has become a real problem for example on Fedora 22 where the
old name is no longer available.
* syncevo-http-server: use TLS instead of SSLv3
This fixes a potential security risk and connection problems with clients
that don't support SSLv3 anymore.
* syncing: avoid segfault for invalid text inside items (FDO #90118)
As reported by Canonical, syncing fails if data items contain
text which is not correct UTF-8 in one of the fields that
SyncEvolution logs in the command line output (like SUMMARY of
a calendar event).
That is because the byte string coming from the item is passed
unchecked to the D-Bus implementation for transmission via D-Bus. But
D-Bus strings must be correct UTF-8, so depending on the D-Bus library
in use, one gets a segfault (GIO D-Bus, due to an unchecked NULL
pointer access) or an "out of memory" error (libdbus, which checks for
NULL).
SyncEvolution now replaces invalid bytes with a question mark in its
output while preserving the rest of the text.
* file backend: log item manipulation
Extracting a meaningful description of each item from the Synthesis
engine when updating and adding items is easy to do for items of
certain known types (contacts and calendar items).
* command line: preserve log prefix of target side of local sync
In some cases, the prefix which was supposed to be embedded
in the log messages from the target side of a local sync got
lost on the way to the command line tool.
Primarily this affected the added/updated/deleted messages, as in:
[INFO remote@client] @client/addressbook: started
[INFO remote@client] updating "Joan Doe"
[INFO remote@client] @client/addressbook: received 1/1
* compile fix: use ${PKG_CONFIG} instead of pkg-config.
This fixes the build on Exherbo that only has prefixed versions of
pkg-config.
* WebDAV: handle 403 during Google OAuth authentication
When sending an access token with insufficient scope (for example,
because the Ubuntu Online Accounts service definition was incomplete,
as documented in FDO #86824), Google responds with a 403 "service
denied" error.
This is now dealt with by retrying, just as for a transient 401 error.
* CalDAV: more efficient "is empty" check (FDO #86335)
Since 1.4.99.4, syncing WebDAV collections always checks first
whether there are items in the collections. This was partly done for
slow sync prevention (which is not necessary for empty collections),
partly for the "is the datastore usable" check.
However, this did not take into account that for CalDAV collections,
the entire content gets downloaded for this check. That is because
filtering by item type (VEVENT vs. VJOURNAL) is not implemented
correctly by all servers. So now all CalDAV syncs, whether incremental
or slow, always transfered all items, which is not the
intention (incremental syncs should be fast and efficient).
This release adds a more efficient isEmpty() check: for simple CardDAV
collections, only luid and etag get transferred, as in
listAllItems(). This is the behavior from 1.5.
For CalDAV, a report with a filter for the content type is used and
the transfer gets aborted after the first item, without actually
double-checking the content of the item. This is different from
listAllItems(), which really transfers the content. This extra content
check would only be needed for some old servers (Radical 0.7) and is
not essential, because reporting "not empty" even when empty is safe.
* WebDAV: send Basic Auth via http in some cases (FDO #57248)
It turned out that finding databases on an Apple Calendar server accessed via
http depends on sending Basic Auth even when the server does not ask for it:
without authentication, there is no information about the current principal,
which is necessary for finding the user's databases.
To make this work again, sending the authentication header is now forced for
plain http if (and only if) the request which should have returned the
principal URL fails to include it. This implies sending the same request
twice, but as this scenario should be rare in practise (was only done for
testing), this is acceptable.
* Ubuntu Online Accounts: support plain text credentials
The backend for UOA was rewritten by Alberto Mardegan and now also
can use plain username/password credentials stored in UOA.
* various compiler error and warning fixes
Source, Installation, Further information
=========================================
http://syncevolution.org/blogs/pohly/2015/syncevolution-151-released
Source code bundles for users are available in
https://download.01.org/syncevolution/syncevolution/sources
and the original source is in the git repositories
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/SyncEvolution/
i386, lpia and amd64 binaries for Debian-based distributions are
available via the "stable" syncevolution.org repository. Add the
following entry to your /etc/apt/source.list:
deb https://download.01.org/syncevolution/apt stable main
The GPG key for the repository needs to be imported as root with:
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B2EC3981
Then install "syncevolution-evolution", "syncevolution-kde" and/or
"syncevolution-activesync".
These binaries include the "sync-ui" GTK GUI and were compiled for
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid), except for ActiveSync binaries which were
compiled for Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu Saucy, Ubuntu Trusty an Debian
Jessie. The packages mentioned above are meta-packages which pull in
suitable packages matching the distro during installation.
Older distributions like Debian 4.0 (Etch) can no longer be supported
with precompiled binaries because of missing libraries, but the source
still compiles when not enabling the GUI (the default).
The same binaries are also available as .tar.gz and .rpm archives in
https://download.01.org/syncevolution/syncevolution/. In contrast
to 0.8.x archives, the 1.x .tar.gz archives have to be unpacked and the
content must be moved to /usr, because several files would not be found
otherwise.
After installation, follow the
http://syncevolution.org/documentation/getting-started steps.
--
Patrick Ohly, on behalf of everyone who has helped
to make SyncEvolution possible:
http://syncevolution.org/about/contributors
6 months, 3 weeks
[SyncEvolution] KDE5 support
by Tino Mettler
Hi Patrick,
the Debian project plans to remove QT4 from the next stable release
(Buster). This means that the Akonadi backend needs to be ported to
KDE5 so it can be shipped with Buster. Do you have any plans for this?
Regards,
Tino
1 year, 10 months
[SyncEvolution] Syncevolution chokes on one calendar entry, doesn't say which, doesn't allow to skip, doesn't show actual server's complaint
by Alain Knaff
Hi,
When trying to use synccalendar, I occasionally get the following:
[INFO @aev] operation temporarily (?) failed, going to retry in 5.0s before giving up in 298.7s: REPORT 'check for items': bad HTTP status: <status 1.1, code 503, class 5, Service Unavailable>
And then repeats the message with ever growing delays.
Apparently, sync-evolution or the server doesn't like a certain calendar
entry, and rather than move on to the next, just gets stuck on it.
Sometimes killing syncevolution, and then starting it again fixes the
issue, and sometimes not. Btw, to kill syncevolution, just using Ctrl-C
doesn't do the job, you've actually got to use the kill command from
another terminal session, or use Ctrl-Z and then kill.
May I suggest three small changes to make this issue much less painful:
1. When such a thing occurs, actually say *which* calendar entry causes
this. For most practical cases date, time and title should be enough to
uniquely identify the entry and allow the user to "manually" transfer it
(i.e. manually delete it on phone, manually change/create it on server,
and sync it back), or even to allow him to understand what is causing
this.
2. The message just echoes the HTTP Status line, and not the rest of the
contents of the server's error page. Maybe the server (MS Exchange via
davmail) does indeed explain what's the issue with that calendar entry?
Bad status? Bad Reminder options? etc.? Impossible to know easily, as
nowadays most server use HTTPs and so even tcpdump wouldn't be any help.
3. Rather than just retrying forever, syncevolution should skip over the
entry, move on to the next, and repeat in the final summary message that
such-and-such entry was skipped (and identify the entry as described in
point 1)
Other question: I run syncevolution on a BQ Aquaris E5 phone with Ubuntu
Touch. Ubuntu no longer supports touch, however, and apt-get upgrade has
stopped working for a while. So I'm stuck at version 1.5.1+15.04.20160706-0ubuntu1
However, UBports has taken up this task, and I suppose they've got a
repository somewhere from which to get updates from them. Unfortunately
there site is silent on that issue, and only describes how to install
ubports from scratch on a new device, and not how to upgrade an existing
Ubuntu touch device. Do you by chance know what to enter into
/etc/apt/sources.list to get updates from UBports rather than from
Ubuntu?
Third question: due to this whole dropped support issue, I'm in the
market for a new phone, and it will either be stock Android or Lineage
OS (due to current lack of other Linux alternatives :-( ). Does
syncevolution work on these two OS'es?
Thanks,
Alain
1 year, 10 months
