akonadictl fsck: What messages indicate real issues and what to do about them?

[Martin Steigerwald]

Dan,

thank you very much for your prompt response.

Daniel Vrátil - 29.01.18, 21:00:
> Bug 389607 - akonadictl fsck: Show more helpful messages
> 
> > Okay, it seems that is about all that I as mostly a user and tester of
> > KDEPIM can do about the issue without learning to code Akonadi fixes
> > myself. (I still not fully understand the architecture and the source file
> > layout.)
> 
> Feel free to ask, I'll be happy to clarify everything, if it makes it easier
> for you to debug some issues.

As I wrote in the other thread in an reply to Sandro:

My main challenge is this: I – or another user or tester – see an issue. I can 
reproduce it on my setup. It may be quite hard and time consuming to find, 
test and describe an setup to reproduce the issue for the developer. And I am 
also not really sure what information the developer needs. That leads to bug 
reports you or another developer cannot easily act upon.

Or I can´t reproduce it and just see the inconsistencies in akonadictl fsck, 
not having a clue on why or when they happened.

Now how to solve this dilemma? What is it what you need in order to reproduce 
things or if you cannot still figure out, what is going on? How to tell how a 
certain inconsistency that akonadictl fsck happened? 

> > Of course I could ditch the database once again, for example by switching
> > to PostgreSQL database (from MariaDB), but I bet the underlying issues
> > are not yet all fixes, to after some time akonadictl fsck may just
> > display similar errors.
> 
> I don't believe the database backend has anything to do with any of the
> issues mentioned above.

I don´t believe this either. But redoing the database whether it as MariaDB or 
PostgreSQL will give a clean state again. Of course I´d risk data loss this 
way. Data loss of probably >3000 mails that are just stored in the database 
(item without RID).

But this is the only way I think I could sensibly achieve consistency at the 
moment. But then I need to monitor the consistency state in order to figure 
out when inconsistencies happen in order to at least get a hint at how to 
reproduce them.

This is my main issue: I don´t get how I can really be helpful in testing 
things and reporting bugs in a way you or another developer can actually do 
something about it. My last attempt clearly shows it. I probably have reported 
more bugs that do not really help to move forward :(

For an user this is still just a mail program, a calendar application, an 
address book. I really aim and helping to get things unstuck. To help towards 
an situation where users do not report similar issues over and over again, 
feeling helpless to do anything about it to improve the situation.

Of course I know you and others worked hard to improve things. And it got 
better. But IMHO its not there yet. It still does not appear to be robust and 
service-able enough for everyone.

I clearly accept guidance on how to help. I just want to help efficiently and 
I don´t really know how to.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin