GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 735968
all events are sometimes grayed out
Last modified: 2019-10-10 14:02:09 UTC
I'm running California from git master on Ubuntu 14.10. When I start California, all events in the current month are sometimes grayed out. When I scroll down to other months, some months' events are gray, and others' events are in a normal color. This behavior is highly irregular: when I restart California, sometime the current month goes back to its normal color, and sometimes it doesn't. When I scroll back and forth between months, usually they keep their color (gray or not gray), but sometimes they seem to change. I doubt this is solely a network connectivity issue, since this happens even when I have a fast reliable Internet connection. Do other people see this too?
I've never seen this. Note that California does not gray-out events for any reason; it always uses the calendar's configured colors no matter what issue appears. I wonder if this is a theme or Utopic problem. Can you take a screenshot or screencast of the issue?
I'll attach two screenshots, one of my calendar for September 2014 (with events grayed out) and one for October 2014 (where they appear normal). These were taken during the same run of California. As I mentioned before, this occurs randomly: if I restart California, the colors may be fine, or not, and they seem to vary from month to month. It's actually a relief to hear that this is likely a display issue. I thought these events were grayed out due to some problem involving EDS or network connectivity.
Created attachment 285350 [details] screenshot with grayed out events
Created attachment 285351 [details] screenshot with normal events
Weird. Did this just start happening recently? Looking at the code, the only way the color could change is if an EDS client changed the calendar's color property, i.e. Evolution. California will detect the change and update the UI to reflect it. But then you should see that in every view, not just one month and not the other. If you run California with logging enabled, i.e.: $ G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all california You'll see something like this when the calendar color was changed, either by California or elsewhere: ** (california:17583): DEBUG: backing-eds-calendar-source.vala:89: EDS updated Calendar property color ** (california:17583): DEBUG: backing-eds-calendar-source.vala:154: Updating EDS source Calendar... If you're not seeing that, it really sounds like a display issue to me.
I think this did start relatively recently. I just ran with G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all, and saw no messages of the sort you mentioned above. Here's another major clue. I have two calendars visible in California: 'Adam Dingle' (hosted at Google) and 'Calendar' (which is local, I think and has virtually no events). Today, for other reasons, I changed the display color of 'Calendar' to red. And now, lo and behold, I no longer see the grayed out color I mentioned above. But events on my main 'Adam Dingle' calendar now intermittently appear red! So I think the real problem is that events on one calendar are sometimes displayed using a different calendar's color.
I just tried something else. I hid the red 'Calendar' calendar, and restarted California. Only my main 'Adam Dingle' calendar was now visible. I then scrolled from month to month. For some months, my events weren't displayed at all! With the calendar on one of those months, I then opened the calendar list and set the red 'Calendar' calendar to be visible. All my events immediately appeared, in red! I then hid that calendar, and the events vanished again.
Another thing: if I add a new calendar in California, then (almost) all of its events appear in the mysterious color (i.e. the color of the Calendar calendar, or no color at all if Calendar is not visible) until I restart. This seems entirely reproducible.
I have to admit, Adam, I'm trying to follow this and it's kind of difficult. I have a growing suspicion that your Calendar calendar is not a local EDS calendar, but is in fact tied to a remote calendar, possibly the same as your "Adam Dingle" calendar -- but, of course, I'm not sure. I say this because when you first run Evolution, it prompts for an email address. If it's Google it will automatically sync your "Calendar" calendar with Google Calendar. (At least, it did this for me.) What's more, every attempt I've made to rename my Calendar calendar to something less generic has failed, some kind of EDS limitation. If you look in ~/.config/evolution/sources, you'll see a number of .source files for everything EDS manages (mail, contacts, calendars). My Calendar calendar has this key group: [Collection] BackendName=google CalendarEnabled=true ContactsEnabled=true Identity=jim@yorba.org MailEnabled=true In turn, EDS generates in ~/.cache/evolution/sources/<longname>.source: [Data Source] DisplayName=Calendar Enabled=true Parent=1389137834.3977.12@california The parent is the name of the first file, above. One of my questions for you is what your Calendar calendar is actually backed by, i.e. is it an empty local calendar or is it a network calendar.
Jim, thanks for the suggestion - I think this was exactly the problem. I can't go check my EDS files on the machine where I was seeing this since I've since overinstalled with Trusty (for other reasons). But on my new Trusty machine I also happened to run both Evolution and California and ran into similar symptoms again. In Evolution I could see that I had two calendars with the same events: one was the 'Calendar' calendar, and the other was one I had created in California. I deleted that second calendar, and then everything was fine. Should we close this? I think this is still a usability problem - someone could easily run California and then Evolution, as I did, and then see strange behavior without understanding that they had created duplicate calendars. Should California warn the user if two calendars have the same source?
California is not under active development anymore and saw its last non-cosmetic code changes in March 2016: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/california/commits/master Its codebase has been archived in https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/california/issues/1 Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of GNOME Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. You may want to use `gnome-calendar`.