I have been using a Librem 5 phone with the AweSIMple card/plan which is activated on AT&T for about 6 months now, and regularly use chat(ty?) for SMS/MMS messaging. I’ve sent and received attached images successfully.
Recently, I composed a message with only an emoji and attached a file from ~/Pictures that was created by the Librem 5 camera. (Side note, I really wish I could launch the camera to create an attachment photo instead of saving a photo and attaching as a file.)
This time, chat app initially displayed the image in the conversation, but then started showing an unloaded placeholder icon, over and over and over and over again. Sometimes it shows the image. I’ve deleted the original file (in fact the entire Pictures directory), deleted the chat multiple times (and rebooted multiple times), but the multiplying stream of messages keeps reappearing.
The “broken” ones seem to have appended “_resized” to the image (file) name. I suspect that the image was too large to send and now the resizing operation is looping forever.
Is this conversation and particular message cached somewhere I can delete?
Is there some sort of “head thump” I can apply to chatty or some other system component to get it to give up?
The app itself seems to have no ability to delete a message or attachment (a missing feature, IMO, that is present in the big boys’ messaging apps).
As an added bonus, it is sucking power much faster because of this.
I’ve had similar issues happen 1-2 times since I got my L5.
The somewhat cumbersome fix in my case was to open up the Chatty database (~/.purple/chatty/db/chatty-history.db) using some tool such as this and then deleting the offending message(s).
Thank you @spacemanspiffy !!
That is a huge help.
Sidebar: what is “.purple”?
Mysteriously, the replicated/retry msgs finally disappeared from the conversation. Perhaps some sort of retry timeout. Or enough reboots (I power down most of my gear, including phone(s), every night).
~/.purple is a directory in your home folder that Chatty creates.
Purple itself is “libpurple”, a library used by Chatty, which you can learn about here and here.
sqlitebrowser is displaying beyond the right edge of the screen on my Librem 5. Is there some way to get around it? (rotating phone does not rotate interface - I’ve seen this with a handful of other apps/screens).
If you have an external monitor or Lapdock, that should work well.
What I did was SSH into my phone with X11 forwarding, and then run the app. This way I can access it from my desktop, albeit a little slower. ssh -X <ip or hostname of your phone> and then run sqlitebrowser.
Update:
Doing a little more hunting, I found the offending .jpg file(s) in .local/share/chatty/mms//*.jpg and removed all *.jpg files (after killall chatty x3).
No help, after restarting the app, the stupid conversation reappears with the offending message endlessly repeating. I can see it reappearing in the chatty.db
After some more poking around and looking at the source, I found that mmsdtng was the process using up all the CPU. Killed it, removed it’s cached copy of the .jpg file, re-deleted the (new) messages from the chatty.db, and things seem to be sane again.
I have not root caused the failure (yet); I need my phone to function properly. But I’m now armed for the next time it happens. Until I have time to debug, I’m refraining from attaching images. The message that caused the issue was an attached image and a single emoji, in case that helps anyone track it down or confirm the behavior.
For apps that don’t scale correctly, you can use the Phosh Mobile Settings app to make an app persistently fit the screen (although the app still might display too small to comfortably read):
Open an app.
Then open Phosh Mobile Settings, click Compisitor, find the name of your open app, enable.
Or, as an alternative, adjust Display scaling temporarily in the main Settings app.
