[Libreoffice-qa] Poor migration of user profiles to LO 4 (was: What are "Preferences" when moving from 3.x to 4.x?)

[Stephan Bergmann]

[getting the dev list into the loop]

On 02/04/2013 12:39 PM, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> On 02/01/2013 06:21 PM, Pedro wrote:
>> I just updated LO from 3.6.4.3 to 4.0 rc3
>> Thanks to the patch from Stephan Bergmann
>> (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57061) some items are now
>> migrated to 4.0
>>
>> Items migrated: User Data, View preferences (such as icon theme and size)
>> Items NOT migrated: Recent Document list, Extensions
>>
>> Is this expected? Shouldn't it pick up all items so that you continue
>> from
>> where you left off?
>
> I just updated <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57061#c27>,
> comment 27 to " Not all personal data imported during install from /3
> User Profile," with some rationale and details.

Quoting <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57061#c27>:

"In general, what parts of an old user profile are migrated is 
controlled by configuration settings in the 
/org.openoffice.Setup/Migration tree (see 
officecfg/registry/data/org/openoffice/Setup.xcu).  The data that is 
present there is apparently mostly what had been there for the migration 
from OOo 2 to OOo 3 already.  The reason why certain parts of a user 
profile had been excluded from migration back than are probably lost to 
history.

"Note that this user profile migration code already kicked in on Linux 
during the LO 3 timeframe, when 
<http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=9276f7d5740a28b342db2a9bcd8644ff2f4f5742> 
'fdo#32263' moved the location of the user profile from ~/.libreoffice/3 
to ~/.config/libreoffice/3 and 
<http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=6b522673373797bbf53d795d53e0ec45175a5d67> 
'default config location has changed, look in old config dir when 
migrating' enabled LO's migration code to migrate from an existing 
~/.libreoffice/3 to a new ~/.config/libreoffice/3.

"Therefore, at least my assumption would have been that that migration 
worked acceptably, or else (Linux) users would already have complained 
when upgrading from old LO 3 versions (that used ~/.libreoffice/3) to 
newer LO 3 versions (that used ~/.config/libreoffice/3) about settings 
getting lost.  However, re-checking that now, things like the list of 
recently used documents indeed were not migrated back then, either. 
Apparently nobody looked at the migration machinery in detail, whether 
it works acceptably for migrating individual settings to a new LO 4 user 
profile."

I'm not sure what our position should be on that.  Given that it didn't 
work any better in the Linux case discussed above, do we consider this 
good enough?  Or is it severe enough to consider it a blocker for 4.0.0?

In any case, I'm personally not familiar enough with the various stuff 
actually stored in the user profile (apart from the extension stuff, for 
which I checked that it should be generally covered) to judge what to do 
about it, so I would ask people who do know specifics about certain 
parts of the user profile to step in.

Stephan