mailtransports has wrong owner.

[humufr]

My brother in law did an upgrade from ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 by mistake. Happily he does have some problem in the upgrade and call me. So I have been able to stop him to connect on kde and so loose his mail. I still surprise that nothing has been done to transfer kmail data from a kde3 account to the new (and only) kde4 version now. But it's not the problem here. The problem here is that an upgrade to 4.1.96 (yes the ppa package I using 4.1 and it's ok for me but not for a regular user as 4.2 should be) and when he tried to configure the smtp un kmail it was impossible. I tried myself (thanks to vnc) and same thing so I investigate a little but find nothing. So I thought to do the configuration in the config file directly and not using the software and I saw a very "funny" things. Some of the config file does have a bad owner (with very restrictive permission) and for example the file mailtransports (where are the smtp configuration) was owned by root and so that explain why we were unable to configure kmail correctly. I look quickly and I saw other file in the brand new .kde directory like this. So I did a brutal change to affect all the ownership as it should have been.

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

Kmail data transfers just fine on a KDE3 -> KDE4 upgrade done 8.04 -> 8.10. If he upgraded to a PPA, that's totally unsupported and I have no idea if it works.

[humufr (humufr-deactivatedaccount)]

What the transfer is fine? Is it a joke? I did the upgrade to the ppa because I knew unfortunatly by experience that there are no transfer at all from kde3 -> kde4 in 8.10 so I was expected that something was done in the futur package (as ppa is supposed to be) but this is not the problem here. And this is without the fact that kmail in kde4.1 is not usable with gmail and imap and the upgrade to the 4.2 version is solving it (a good reason to not use official package, isn't it?).

The problem was that some file have been created with a bad ownership. Perhaps is it only a problem for ppa but as there are test version for the futur official one I was stupid enough to think that this kind of problem could interest the packagers... As I told I solve the problem so it's not really a problem now for my brother in law. Sorry to send some "junk" bug report I won't do it anymore.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Hello humufr!

I can assure you that transition from KDE 3's KMail configuration to KDE 4's in stock 8.10 is working just fine. I did a couple of different migration scenarios, and besides some issue what slowed down all of KOrganizer migration of any PIM data worked just fine. So I must assume you ran across a side case issue. Unfortunately, it's not only you who didn't report such flaws, but a lot of intrepid users, which makes it quite difficult for us to resolve these upgrade issues.
IMAP with GMail is also working just fine in 8.10, I am using it right now, as a matter of fact I used it to monitor this bug, so I can't really say that is a known issue either. In any case, upgrading to pre-release unofficial packages due to such a reason is very unadvisable, especially if you don't even give us a chance to help you (and probably a lot more users) by resolving the issue and providing a package update.

Finally, I am afraid you misinterpreted what Scott said. Of course testing future releases is an important task, but it only makes sense if it is done in the distribution series the version gets deployed with (in this case 9.04), the backports to Intrepid are (as the PPA name suggests) purely experimental and will never reach official support level. Therefore doing a straight upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10+kubuntu-experimental is completely unsupported as we do no quality assurance to this upgrade path at all. Technically it could tear apart all data.

I might also add, that by just resolving the issue for yourself without first reporting a bug or getting otherwise in contact witht he team, you might very well destroy the very data that is necessary to trace the problem. There isn't "just" a wrong file permisson issue, if it were, we would have resolved it before releasing the packages most likely, but there might be a wrong file permission issue under certain circumstances. If we don't know the circumstances, we are most likely not able to resolve the issue at all.

I certainly hope to receive further bug reports, especially for migration issues of 8.04 straight to 9.04, since this will be the upgrade path we will most likely support (besides the obvious 8.10 to 9.04 one of course).

Thank you and have a pleasant day :)