Comment 4 for bug 713135

It does work. Here is what I did to confirm:

1. removed hamster from my panel
2. logged out
3. verified no 'hamster' processes were running (ps auxww|grep hamster)
4. mv ~/.local/share/hamster-applet ~/.local/share/hamster-applet.bak
5. Then did:
$ /usr/bin/hamster-service
hamster-service up
updated database from version 7 to 9
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/hamster-service", line 23, in <module>
    loop.run()
KeyboardInterrupt
$ /usr/bin/hamster-service
hamster-service up
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/hamster-service", line 23, in <module>
    loop.run()
KeyboardInterrupt
$ rm -rf ./hamster-applet
$ /usr/bin/hamster-service
hamster-service up
updated database from version 7 to 9
^CTraceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/hamster-service", line 23, in <module>
    loop.run()
KeyboardInterrupt

I thought the 'updated database from version 7 to 9' was weird, but hamster seems to output that when ~/.local/share/hamster-applet doesn't exist (as seen from the above).