SyncEvolution 1.5.1 released#
Maintenance release. Binaries now also get compiled for Debian 8.0 “Jessie”. The apt repositories on syncevolution.org (mirrored on download.01.org) are signed with a different key than before, see “Installation” below.
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
Upgrading from releases <= 1.3.99.4:#
If the value of “username/databaseUser/proxyUser” contains a colon, the “user:” prefix must be added to the value, to continue treating it like a plain user name and not some reference to an unknown identity provider (like “id:”, “goa:”, “signon:”, etc.). The lookup of passwords in GNOME Keyring was updated slightly in 1.3.99.5. It may be necessary to set passwords anew if the old one is no longer found.
Upgrading from release 1.2.x:#
The sync format of existing configurations for Mobical (aka Everdroid) must be updated manually, because the server has encoding problems when using vCard 3.0 (now the default for Evolution contacts): syncevolution –configure \ syncFormat=text/x-vcard \ mobical addressbook The Funambol template explicitly enables usage of the “refresh-from-server” sync mode to avoid getting throttled with 417 ‘retry later’ errors. The same must be added to existing configs manually: syncevolution –configure \ enableRefreshSync=TRUE \ funambol
Upgrading from releases before 1.2:#
Old configurations can still be read. But writing, as it happens during a sync, must migrate the configuration first. Releases >= 1.2 automatically migrates configurations. The old configurations will still be available (see “syncevolution –print-configs”) but must be renamed manually to use them again under their original names with older SyncEvolution releases.
Source, Installation, Further information#
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 /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 and Ubuntu Trusty, and 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 [the download directories](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 [getting started](/documentation/getting-started) steps. More specific [HOWTOs](/wiki/howto) can be found in the Wiki.