Add a website page to tell people about upgrading from 1.5 to 2.0

[sjors]

There have been some people reporting missing emoticons between 1.5 and 2.0. There may also be some other format changes in KMess' data files.

I believe we should make the switch to 1.5 to 2.0 as elegant and wonderful as possible. Therefore, we need a page that addresses issues like that and possibly even steps people through the process (on various platforms, including a generic one containing just things like "To keep your emoticons, move that directory there").

[diederik]

Would it be possible to automate the conversion?

[valerio]

I thought about making a shellscript ran on kmess2 on first start.

It should:

1. check for a flag file in 1.5's datadir, if present abort, if not continue
2. it should copy over to 2.0's datadir as much data as possible:
   • account names
   • contact list settings (if possible, the data has changed a bit)
   • emoticon themes
   • passwords (kwallet support will pop up and offer to migrate them)
   • optionally, the caches of received emoticons and display pics
3. create a flag in 2.0's datadir (or maybe there's an easy way to avoid calling the script altogether if it's not the first start)

You can look up the prefixes with kde-config --localprefix and kde4-config --localprefix.

[valerio]

Script to migrate aliases, we could base ours on that one! (Original post)

[diederik]

Given that user data is important (thumbs up for migrating them!) shouldn't we write the helper app in C++ with Qt? It would give us more control and better data structure management to convert the data safely.

The last thing I'd like to see is some shell command failing at $distribution because they've set things up differently.

[valerio]

Yes, but is there any KDE4 method to call to find out which datadir is used by a KDE3 installation, if any?

From the shell we've got easy access to kde-config --localprefix, but from C++?

As an extreme measure we could run it as a kprocess...

[diederik]

I think you'll have to run kde-config, getting access to KStandardDirs from the KDE 3 libs seams quite hard to me.

[sjors]

For now, I think it is best if we write a simple page with instructions for users to merge themselves. If it turns out to be a really straight-forward path that can be automatized, we can write a shell/whatever script or a program to do it for the user.

I wrote a little intro at http://kmess.org/installing/upgrading15to20.html (page will appear about 40 minutes after posting this comment). This page will contain instructions for moving the old KMess 1.5 data to the new KMess 2.0 data directory; I'm now going to try installing Kubuntu Hardy which still has KDE 3, I'll do some working with kmess, change some configuration, then try loading that data to KMess 2.0. Anything I need to change, I'll add to the page. If any of you knows anything that must be changed, please add it to the page :)

[valerio]

2.0 is out; if this page will be needed, we will add it.