CAnnot delete Calendars in Evolution 2.10

I saw the same behavior, came here to report it, and found this and similar bugs. I had created calendars I could not delete. However, I could not reproduce it until I deleted the calendar manually (by going into the .evolution/calendar/local directory and deleting the directory containing the calendar). Once I did that, I could not delete the calendar. The events did go away on the next start of evolution, and I could then delete the calendar. Starting manually or with a gui entry made no difference.

This problem is triggered by the lack of good documentation for evolution. The docs say what each button does, but that is not good documentation, that is a cop-out. Good documentation describes how a program is used. The problem I had leading up to this was that I thought (and this makes total sense to me as a 20+-year unix user) that I could transport the .evolution directory from one machine to another. This lost most of my calendar entries. I did not know about going into my .evolution and reading the files as ICAL files, because I did not know anything about how evolution stores its data, and this is hidden from the user in the docs. This common problem of how to move calendars from one machine to another should be covered prominently in the docs.

Also, when I converted from FC3 to Ubuntu 7.04, the Personal tasks survived but the Work tasks did not. This may have to do with FC using an FQDN and Ubuntu using just the hostname without the domain as the hostname. I see that the work tasks are there under the FQDN in the .evolution directory, but they have become separated from the application. This behavior should be fixed somehow. Perhaps it should look for calendars in its directory tree that it doesn't know about and ask the user to import them. Now that I know about importing calendars, it seems simple to do manually, but it has been months since I lost my work tasks and I only now learned about what I should have done.

So, I'm confirming this bug:
start evolution
make a calendar
add a task
delete the file containing the task
try to delete the calendar
it won't let you
quit
restart
the task is done and you can delete the calendar.

Suggestions:
1. make it so it can delete the calendar in this case.
2. document how to move calendars from one machine to another in a prominent place. Ditto what happens if machine names change.

--jh--

Does the bug happen without doing modification outside of the software? It's not really an evolution bug if you incorrectly copy datas around

I did not copy/move/touch any files from .evolution from outside Evolution. So for me it seems to be a bug, as it is impossible to delete calendars from Evolution from within Evolution.

Somewhere I found that you can remove them by deleting files, but this is not what I want.

Thank you

Marking unconfirmed, a way to trigger the bug would be useful to work on it

I simply added several local calendar, and then I wanted to remove them again, by right-clicking on the calendar Name and Select 'Delete'. A confirmation Message appears, but nothing happens. The calendar is not deleted.

Maybe this helps.

Responding to Sebastien, yes, you have to delete some data before you see the problem. However, good design would not then make it impossible to delete the associated handle on the data. On the contrary, if the program notices something is missing it should either delete the handle to the missing data or (better) complain and offer options. Judging by the number of similar bugs, this is a common problem.

The idea that the ap directory is untouchable is a holdover from Windows and is quite non-Unix. There are lots of reasons to allow the user to work with data directly, and the better aps both document how to do this and handle the changes gracefully. In this case, one is *forced* to look under the hood to do the basic task of moving data from one machine to another. This basic task is totally undocumented, and the obvious action of simply moving a .evolution tree from one machine to another makes all your non-default calendars inaccessible from within the program, even though the data are still in the same files as on the old machine. You can only say "do nothing outside the program" if it is both possible and well documented how to do all the obvious tasks from inside the program. This is not currently the case: you do have to poke around in .evolution to find the files to import to regain access to the data.

--jh--

There is a "backup settings" and a "restore settings" in the menu, you can use them instead of copying datas by hand. When you copy the .evolution directory you also have to copy the gconf configuration. If you break your configuration because you don't know what you are doing and don't copy everything you need that's not a software bug. Anyway your bug is different of the one reported here which happens to the submitter without copying any configuration. You can open an another bug about your issues if you want though

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? May you test the same with the evolution version available on Hardy?, thanks in advance!.

Sorry, I'm still on Feisty and it's a production environment, so I won't be able to do that soon.

--jh--

Closing this for now, feel free to re open it if you can reproduce it with latest evolution on hardy, thanks you.