[Linux Mint] Ugrading gramps from v5,2,4 to v6.0.5, and it is not going well

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Linux Mint 21.3. Upgrading from v5,2,4 to v6.0.5, and it is not going well. Made backups in both .gramps and .gpkg formats.

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“not going well” doesn’t even hint at the nature of the problem.

What is happening?

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If you can start Gramps v6, but don’t see your Family Tree, open the Preferences and choose the [Family Tree] tab. Check that the ‘Database path’ field points to your database.

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I backed up my v5.2.4 files, but could not figure out how to make the “hardy and portable XML format”. Then installed the v6.0.5 flatpack (yuk). The gramps flatpack attempted to open and convert my database, but seemed to fail. Alas I cannot remember what happened. So, now I do not know what to do to recover my data and begin to use v6. Any help would be greatly appreciated and earn beer points for someone.

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I’m no expert but someone will correct me if I’m wrong…

Can’t you simply create a new empty tree and then import the back up you made into that tree?

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The working file format is a SQLite database file and a cache folder of media thumbnails. (And another cache of map tile files.) In addition, there are lots of .ini files that store configuration choices.

The backup/archival format is XML written to a file with a .gramps or .gpkg file extension.
.gramps files can be either compressed or in uncompressed plain text. (The default is compressed.)

.gpkg files (Gramps Package : Gramps XML plus media) are always compressed because they can also archive the media files.

You can decompress these files to inspect at the plain XML text. (I tend to use 7zip or similar tool.)

The easiest way to open an import a backup archive is a starting point with Gramps not running. Right-click the archive in the OS desktop and opt to open the file with the Gramps application. This will prompt Gramps to launch, create a new and blank Tree database, name the new Tree similarly to the archive filename, load that Tree and begin importing the archive into the Tree.

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Thanks for this suggestion. I imported a bunch of stuff, but attempting to load a person or a family produced in an error

File “/app/lib/python3.12/site-packages/gramps/gen/display/place.py”, line 84, in display_event
return self.display(db, place, event.get_date_object(), fmt)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/app/lib/python3.12/site-packages/gramps/gen/display/place.py”, line 96, in display
pf = self.place_formats\[fmt\]
\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~^^^^^
IndexError: list index out of range

This error may be related to problems setting (or resetting) the base media path.

(I tried submitting a bug report, but had password issues.)[Admin: Reset password email sent as last login was in 2017 and account expired]

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The place_format.xml file was not imported to your 6.0 user directory from your 5.2 folder.

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Thanks for the suggestions. v6.0.5 now seems to be working better, but it still unable to find some information. (1) The links to all media seem to be broken. I changed the Base path for relative media paths to a directory that contains various directories containing media objects. But it doesn’t seem to help. (2) Links to children in families also seem to be broken.

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Alas there are remaining issues with media paths. Most (exception noted below) media do not show reporting a File does not exist error. The path to the media object is obviously wrong. /home/USER/Personal/Genealogy/Personal/Genealogy/Scans should be simply /home/USER/Personal/Genealogy/Scans. I have set the Base media path to /home/USER/Personal/Genealogy/. The exception I referred to above is one of the most recent media objects added to my data base.

Also I seem to have 3 gramps.ini files: $ find . -iname gramps.ini
./.gramps/gramps51/gramps.ini
./.gramps/gramps52/gramps.ini
./.var/app/org.gramps_project.Gramps/config/gramps/gramps60/gramps.ini

For now I’m stuck. My data are intact, and my database seems to be intact. The problem seems to be getting gramps to correctly access the dats.

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It is a matter of making the base media path set in Preferences plus the path of each media record to complete the full path to each media object.

You set the path in Preferences to /home/USER/Personal/Genealogy/. Then the path in the media record will be something like births/filename.jpg.

You can use the Media Manager’s Replace substrings in the path to make the records agree with the file’s hard drive location.

The Isotammi addon Property Editor can also be used to do a batch edit of the path field from the search and replace.

The Media Verify addon tool’s Verify option will scan all the files in the base directory set in Preferences and compare the checksums stored in each Gramps media record and locate each record. It will present a list of the files and present a list of changes to be made in the record’s path field. Using the Fix option will make those changes.

Note: MV works off the checksums set in Gramps when the media file was added. If you have edited any media file after it was added to Gramps, it will show as a missing file. MV cannot find or fix it even if the file shows that it there. A manual edit will be necessary or using the methods listed above.

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./.gramps/gramps51/gramps.ini
./.gramps/gramps52/gramps.ini

These are remnants from previous installs. Even after deleting or uninstalling the older program files, the user files remain. Once you have 6.0.5 up and running to your total satisfaction, the old user files can be deleted.

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Thanks for all your help, Dave. Media Manager did the trick. My media files all seem (mostly) correct now. A couple of strays are wandering around, but they aren’t critical and will get resolved eventually.

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