updating offlineimape makes it re-download whole folders

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 07:49:02PM +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I had a computer running Fedora 17, which among other things kept a
> complete local copy of certain remote IMAP accounts with offlineimap and
> the configuration pasted below.
> 
> Yesterday I installed Fedora 20 on that box, which upgraded offlineimap to
> version 6.5.5 (don't remember what it was on Fedora 17...).
> 
> Now, when I run offlineimap -c offlineimaprc, the tool starts downloading
> again whole folders on the server, that were never touched in the last 2
> years, and that offlineimap in Fedora 17 had already completely mirrored
> locally. Why? It **may** be that the current numeric uid of the "marco"
> user re-created when installing on Fedora 20 is not the same of the same
> user in Fedora 17, but is there any link? If yes, how to tell offlineimap
> to not care about it?

If yes, I see 3 possible causes if you're sure to have kept the required
local cache of the accounts as-is:

0. The name of the accounts was changed (case sensitive).

1. It might be due to the change of the local OfflineIMAP cache. At some
point in time in the past we changed the client cache from plain text to
sqlite databases. AFAIR, if sqlite is not configured in the
configuration file, OfflineIMAP should keep and use the cache as plain
text to ensure backward compatibility. If I'm wrong, we might have made
the sqlite the default in a way that the plain text is no more used for
big OfflineIMAP upgrades (which would be emarrasing when migrating from
a very old OfflineIMAP version).  But I'm pretty sure we cared to not
make this issue possible.

2. UID of the server was changed in the same time you made the
distribution upgrade. There's nothing you can do about that but
re-download everything.


Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht