[kde-linux] Kopete and MSN after upgrade to Fedora 15

[Duncan]

Jerome Yuzyk posted on Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:37:17 -0700 as excerpted:


> I upgraded to Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6.5, and Kopete can't connect to MSN.
> I don't see any bugs that seem related, and nothing through Google.
> Here's what I get when running Kopete from the console.
> 
> Could this be Akonadi getting in the way?
> 
> 
> 
> 1001 ~  kopete kopete(4413)/kio (KDirWatch)
> KDirWatchPrivate::removeEntry: doesn't know
> "/home/jerome/.kde/share/apps/kabc"
> kopete(4413)/libkdepim Akonadi::PluginLoader::scan: missing or empty
> X-KDE- ClassName value in "
> 
> "/usr/share/kde4/apps/akonadi/plugins/serializer/
akonadi_serializer_bookmark.desktop"

... And a bunch of other output skipped.

I'm no akonadi fan for sure (I ultimately switched away from kmail after 
nearly a decade, kde 2.x era, after kmail akonadified, to claws-mail, and 
now have no akonadi nor any part of kdepim on my system, see previous 
posts for my travails if you're interested in the details), but it's 
likely not the problem here.

For some reason kde folks seem to believe developers are the only ones to 
run kde apps from a shell session to try to troubleshoot, and many kde 
apps have so many terrible looking messages even when they're running 
normally, that unless you've run them normally and know what the output 
looks like in ordered to be able to ignore the noise and pick out the 
differences (if you have a system that's working and one that's not, with 
the same version, you can diff the output and see what's different 
between them, thus getting something useful), it's virtually useless.

IOW, yes, those messages look scary, but they don't mean much unless 
you're comparing against the output of the same version on a system 
that's working, or otherwise know how to separate the scary noise from 
the real problem.

A likely more successful troubleshooting approach, particularly if you're 
running on the same home dir (and thus ~/.kde and ~/.config and ~/.local) 
as you were with your older install, is to either create an new user, or 
with kde not running, move your home dir elsewhere, so you're starting 
with a clean user config, and see if it still has the problem.  If a 
fresh user config still has the problem, you know it's not something in 
your user config, but often times it is.

If it turns out to be in your user config, one way to troubleshoot from 
there is the brute force bisect method.  Copy back about half the dirs 
and later files within the dir back each time, then try again, thus 
finding out whether it's in the half that you copied back or the other 
half, then splitting the bad half and testing again, until you get down 
to an individual dir, then an individual file.  Then if you wish, you can 
continue with a text editor.  But at any point you can stop if you think 
you can reconfigure any customizations from there and that it'll be 
easier to do that than to continue bisecting.

After doing that a few times you'll get the hang of how kde organizes 
stuff and bisections from then on will be easier, as you'll be able to 
take and educated guess as to where the problem might be, thus 
eliminating most of the dumb trial and error cycles.  The bisect process 
is definitely tedious the first couple times, until you can do the 
educated guesses, but you learn more about your config that way, and as 
long as the problem is just one setting somewhere, not two different 
settings triggering the same thing, a bisect is usually pretty good at 
finding it.

If you find it's not the user config, post back, and perhaps I or someone 
else can come up with other things to test, tho as I said, I don't run 
anything kdepim any longer, and actually, I don't do well with IM, 
preferring email, so never used kopete either.  But I do know from other 
kde app output that it's just not a good way to try to troubleshoot, and 
that bisect often does work, so that's a place to start.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman