evolution-addressbook-factory fails with slow CardDAV server

[foobar]

I'm trying to use Evolution to access a 6000-vcard collection on a slow CardDAV server.

Evolution (actually the backend 'evolution-addressbook-factory') fails to read the contents of an address book stored on this slow CardDAV server.

The message is "Socket I/O timed out" (after ~90 seconds).

I can reliable synchronize my Android devices with this server, so the CardDAV server is working just fine. I can also access this slow CardDAV server using the Linux "cadaver" program, and just listing all 6000 cards requires about *180 seconds*. Clearly, any timeout of 180 seconds or less built into Evolution won't allow this CardDAV server to operate properly.

So the problem is with Evolution.

The evolution-addressbook-factory program queries this CardDAV server for a list of *all* of the contacts (i.e., all 6000 of them), which takes the server 180 seconds to return.

Somewhere in the evolution-addressbook-factory code, there is a *hard-coded* timeout of something like 90 seconds.

Either this hard-coded timeout should be increased to something like 5 minutes, or an option needs to be included for defining slow servers.

Note that due to standard CardDAV protocols, there doesn't appear to be any way to avoid requesting and accepting the *entire list* of address cards. This is because, while evolution-addressbook-factory synchronizes at most 100 cards at a time, evolution needs to know each card's resource name (file name) when requesting a batch of 100, and the only way to do that is with a PROPFIND on the entire collection.

I have tested Evolution on both x86 and x64 versions, and they both fail in exactly the same way, so the problem isn't machine-specific.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: evolution 3.28.5-0ubuntu0.18.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-70.79-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-70-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.9
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: LXDE
Date: Tue Nov 19 17:46:46 2019
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-05-25 (543 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
SourcePackage: evolution
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)