Upgrading my Librem 5 from Amber to Byzantium, I started with a fresh installation and then selectively copied some files back into place. I don’t like to copy more than is necessary from an old installation.
As part of this, I copied my address book and chat message history. Unfortunately, I had a problem where all my chats with phone numbers had lost the names of the contacts to which the numbers belonged and were just showing phone numbers. The names showed up fine in the address book and in the calls app.
My solution was to edit the ~/.purple/chatty/db/chatty-history.db file after copying it into the new installation and after running Chatty for the first time. I installed sqlitebrowser and edited the “threads” table so that every record’s alias field was set to NULL. Then, the next time Chatty was opened, it quickly populated the list of conversations with the names of the contacts. I made sure Chatty was not running while I edited the database.
Editing the file from the old installation before copying it to the new installation did not work. It was necessary to run Chatty at least once and then edit the new database file it had created.
Thought I’d post this here in case anyone else has the same problem, or thinks I might have missed something or made a mistake.