SyncEvolution 1.3.99.5 released#
SyncEvolution now supports Google CalDAV/CardDAV with OAuth2 authentication. These are the open protocol that Google currently supports and thus the recommended way of syncing with Google, replacing ActiveSync and SyncML (both no longer available to all Google customers).
Support for Google CardDAV is new. Because of a vCard encoding issue on the server side, spaces in long notes may get removed. Like Evolution, SyncEvolution does not yet support some of the advanced features of the server, in particular custom labels for phone numbers, emails and addresses. Likewise, some client properties are not supported by the server: CALURI, CATEGORIES, FBURL, GEO and ROLE are not supported. Of ORG, only the first two components are supported. Currently, properties not supported by one side get lost in a full roundtrip sync. SyncEvolution depends on external components for OAuth2. It can be compiled to use [gSSO](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/SyncEvolution/syncevolution/plain/src/backends/signon/README) or [GNOME Online Accounts](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/SyncEvolution/syncevolution/plain/src/backends/goa/README). GNOME Online Accounts >= 3.10 works out of the box for CalDAV and CardDAV, 3.8 only for CardDAV (but the GNOME Online Accounts binary can be patched to also support CalDAV), anything older than 3.8 does not work. Support for Ubuntu Online Accounts should not be hard to add, but is [not available yet](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mobile.syncevolution/4353/focus=4490). Evolution >= 3.6 is not supported by the binaries on syncevolution.org. On systems with a more recent Evolution, SyncEvolution must be compiled from source. Details:
GTK UI: fixed two crashes - running a sync with no service selected and a 64 bit pointer problem recently discovered by Tino Keitel when compiling the Debian package with -fPIE.
password handling: fix usage of GNOME Keyring and KWallet ([FDO #66110](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66110)) When clients like the GTK sync-ui stored a password, it was always stored as plain text in the config.ini file by the syncevo-dbus-server. The necessary code for redirecting the password storage in a keyring (GNOME or KWallet) simply wasn’t called in that case. The command line tool, even when using the D-Bus server to run the operation, had the necessary code active and thus was not affected. Now all SyncEvolution components use the same default: use safe password storage if either GNOME Keyring or KWallet were enabled during compilation, don’t use it if not. Fixing this revealed other problems, like not being able to store certain passwords that lacked the necessary lookup criteria (like syncURL and/or username). To address this, the lookup criteria where extended and a new check was added to avoid accidentally removing other passwords. As a result, it may be possible that SyncEvolution no longer finds passwords that were stored with older versions of SyncEvolution. In such a case the passwords must be set again.
GNOME: clean up keyring access and require libgnome-keyring >= 2.20 The updated error messages now always include information about the password and libgnome-keyring error texts. A workaround is used for the “Error communicating with gnome-keyring-daemon” problem that started to appear fairly frequently in the automated testing once the keyring was actually used. The problem shows up with some additional debug messages: Gkr: received an invalid, unencryptable, or non-utf8 secret Gkr: call to daemon returned an invalid response: (null).(null)() It seems that sometimes setting up a session with GNOME keyring fails such that all further communication leads to decoding problem. There is an internal method to reset the session, but it cannot be called directly. As a workaround, fake the death of the GNOME keyring daemon and thus trigger a reconnect when retrying the GNOME keyring access. This is done by sending a D-Bus message, which will also affect other clients of GNOME keyring, but hopefully without user-visible effects.
config: enhanced password handling It is possible to configure a plain username/password combination once in SyncEvolution and then use references to it in other configurations, instead of having to set (and update) the credentials in different places. This is useful in particular with WebDAV, where credentials had to be repeated several times (target config, in each database when used as part of SyncML) or when using a service which requires several configs (Google via SyncML and CalDAV). To use this, create a sync config for a normal peer or a dedicated config just for the credentials, with “username/password/syncURL” set. The “syncURL” must be set to something identifying the peer if GNOME Keyring is used for the password storage. Then set “username”, “databaseUser” and “proxyUser” properties to “id:
” and all read and write access to those properties will be redirected by SyncEvolution into that other configuration. This even works in the GTK UI. For user names which contain colons, the new “user: ” format must be used. Strings without colons are assumed to be normal user names, so most old configurations should continue to work. signon: new backend using libgsignond-glib + libaccounts-glib The code works with gSSO (https://01.org/gsso). With some tweaks to the configure check and some ifdefs it probably could be made to work with Ubuntu Online Accounts. The code depends on an account accessible via libaccounts-glib which has a provider and and (optionally) services enabled for that provider. It is not necessary that the account already has a signon identity ID, the backend will create that for the provider (and thus shared between all services) if necessary. Therefore it is possible to use the ag-tool to create and enable the account and services. Provider and service templates are in the next commit.
WebDAV: support OAuth2 If given an authentication configuration which can handle OAuth2, then OAuth2 is used instead of plain username/password authentication.
WebDAV: support Google CardDAV, break Yahoo Google CardDAV has one peculiarity: it renames new contacts during PUT without returning the new path to the client. See also http://lists.calconnect.org/pipermail/caldeveloper-l/2013-July/000524.html SyncEvolution already had a workaround for that (PROPGET on old path, extract new path from response) which happened to work. This workaround was originally added for Yahoo, which sometimes merges contacts into existing ones. In contrast to Yahoo, Google really seems to create new items. Without some server specific hacks, the client cannot tell what happened. Because Google is currently supported and Yahoo is not, let’s change the hard-coded behavior to “renamed items are new”.
WebDAV: started testing with owndrive.com = OwnCloud
GOA: get OAuth2 tokens out of GNOME Online Accounts “username = goa:…” selects an account in GOA and retrieves the OAuth2 token from that. The implementation uses the GOA D-Bus API directly, because our C++ D-Bus bindings are easier to use and this avoids an additional library dependency.
PIM: fix UID usage in sync.py example Using the underscore in the UID has been wrong all along, it only happened to work because UID sanity checking was missing. After adding it, the example broke. Now simply remove the colon. It makes the UID less readable, but it doesn’t have to be, and ensures that file names and database names contain the UID as-is.
PIM: if busy, don’t shut down While there are sessions pending or active, the server should not shut down. It did that while executing a long-running PIM Manager SyncPeer() operations, by default after 10 minutes. This was not a problem elsewhere because other operations are associated with a client, whose presence also prevents shutdowns. Perhaps PIM Manager should also track the caller and treat it like a client.
PBAP: do not end Bluez5 transfer prematurely A transfer was marked as finished prematurely when encountering the “active” Status value, which can happen for longer transfers.
PBAP: add support for obexd 0.48 obexd 0.48 is almost the same as obexd 0.47, except that it dropped the SetFilter and SetFormat methods in favor of passing a Bluex 5-style filter parameter to PullAll. SyncEvolution now supports 4, in words, four different obexd APIs. Sigh.
updated tests
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 http://downloads.syncevolution.org/syncevolution/sources and the original source is [the git repositories](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/SyncEvolution/). i386, lpia and amd64 binaries for Debian-based distributions are available via the “unstable” syncevolution.org repository. Add the following entry to your /apt/source.list:
deb http://downloads.syncevolution.org/apt unstable main 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 “syncevolution-activesync” which depends on libraries in Debian Squeeze, for example EDS 3.4. 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](http://downloads.syncevolution.org/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.