I posted the following in the “Gramps for Genealogists” Facebook group, but it was recommended to me to post here for more technical assistance:
I recently upgraded from Fedora 41 to 42, which changed gramps from gramps-5.2.4-1.fc41.noarch to gramps-6.0.1-1.fc42.noarch.
Now when I launch gramps from the command line I get “Two Gramps application data directories exist” and gramps comes up empty.
I haven’t seen many posts related to this, but I did see that the location of gramps’ data has changed from ~/.gramps to ~/.local/share/gramps, and I now have both. The former has all my files, the later has a directory structure, but no files.
What is the approved method to make my ~/.gramps data available to gramps v6.0.1?
I forgot which version that Gramps started the transistion from ~/.gramps to a linux directory standard called xdg. It might have been 5.2, not sure. My understanding is that at first, Gramps would continue to use the old location for data if present, but if ~/.gramps was not present then the new data directories would be created according to xdg standards (the ~/.local/share/gramps you saw). As for reasons that the Gramps upgrade included in the Fedora 42 upgrade failed to find the old data directory for Gramps, I can only guess. Most likely at some point the old Gramps created the new xdg data directories but it did not finish the transition for whatever reason, so the fresh installation of Gramps is confused.
With hindsight, the best method to transition is to make backups of all important databases before an OS upgrade to a new version (like 41 to 42), whether they are for Gramps, money management, recipes, whatever. Of course reality shows that is easier said than done. Also, there is a database update when going from Gramps 5.2 to 6. If you want to backup your old Gramps file, I recommend using the second suggestion listed below before installing the archived Gramps 5.2.4 flatpak from the gramps-project github Release Gramps flatpak 5.2.4-0 · gramps-project/flatpak · GitHub in order to make a backup of your database before upgrading to Gramps 6. Here are some options I believe might work for you:
If you want to continue using your currently installed Gramps, then open Gramps, go into Edit > Preferences > Family Tree and edit the database path to ~/.gramps (make sure to backup your database before the Fedora 43 upgrade so that if this happens again, you can just import the backup file.) Keep in mind there will probably be a database update when you first open a database from Gramps 5.2 to 6.
Your current Gramps is probably looking in the new xdg data location instead of the old ~/.gramps since both exist. Since you mentioned that the ~/.local/share/gramps is empty, then with Gramps closed, rename ~/.local/share/gramps to something like ~/.local/share/gramps.old and then reopen Gramps. At that point, Gramps should open the ~/.gramps location.