This entry is a quick one, but that could come in handy for anyone migrating to Ubuntu 14.04.

Over the week-end, I upgraded Siduri, my wife’s computer, from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04. Always a harrowing procedure. I mean, I mess up my computer, that’s on me. But to bring somebody else’s workhorse on the operation table, fully knowing that any wrong decision could lead up to a pot of glue? That’s terrifying.

Anyway, cold sweat aside, most of the upgrade went fairly well. With the unavoidable few exceptions. Includind, this time around, KDE’s Knotes, which changed how it stores data, and whose migration program burped an error and failed to do the one job is was made to do. A little bit of research revealed that it’s a known issue, but that the fix is only coming with the next version of KDE.

Well, crap.

As my wife had a good number of notes, that just wouldn’t do. Fortunately, the gods were smiling on us. On closer inspection, it turns out that Knotes senior was using an ICS calendar file to keep its notes, whereas Knotes junior moved to a maildir structure with each note being an email file. That’s all standard stuff. Which is quite welcome, because it means that I can reach for my favorite roll of duct-tape and come up with a quick bridge between the two:

use 5.20.0;

use experimental 'postderef';

use warnings;

use Data::ICal;
use Path::Tiny;
use Email::Simple;

path( $ENV{HOME}, '.local/share/notes/new' )
    ->child( $_->property('uid')->[0]->value )
    ->spew(
        Email::Simple->create( 
            header => [
                From => 'old kde <kde@(nowhere.com)>',
                Subject => $_->property('summary')->[0]->value,
            ],
            body => $_->property('description')->[0]->value
        )->as_string
    ) 
        for Data::ICal->new(
                # Data::ICal doesn't like the PRIORITY property
            data => path( $ENV{HOME}, '.kde/share/apps/knotes/notes.ics')
                    ->slurp =~ s/^PRIORITY:d+\r\n//mr
        )->entries->@*;

In our case, that seems to have done the job rather nicely. All data has been reported as being accounted for and, except for a few unicode funny characters, unmolested.