When something goes wrong.

Getting in touch

No public contact channel is currently provided. RVLTION is not publicly distributed, and support arrangements are handled as part of the acquisition and transfer process.

Operational contact details are intentionally excluded from the public package and may be supplied directly during a confidential transaction process. A public channel has to exist before the software is distributed to users, and until then no address is stated here, because an invented one would send reports nowhere.

The rest of this page is still worth reading. Most of what goes wrong with a local-first application can be diagnosed and fixed without anyone else being involved, and the steps below are the ones that work.

Reporting a problem

Useful reports have four things in them.

1. What you did, and what happened instead. The sequence matters more than the description.
2. The version. Bottom right of the status bar.
3. Your operating system and version.
4. The log, if you can produce one. Start RVLTION with the environment variable RVLTION_LOG=rvltion_lib=debug and reproduce the problem.

The log records what the application did, never what you copied. That is deliberate and tested.

What not to send

Do not send your database file, and do not paste clipboard content into a report. RVLTION goes to some trouble to keep captured content out of its own logs; a bug report should not put it back in. If a problem only reproduces with particular content, describe its shape rather than its contents: a long URL, a PEM block, text with unusual characters.

If it will not start

The likeliest cause is that the history file cannot be opened. RVLTION shows a dialog naming the file rather than closing silently.

It will not replace or delete a database it could not open. A file that fails to open may still be recoverable, and replacing it would destroy that chance, so recovery is left as your decision.

1. Close RVLTION and start it again. If another copy was still running, the file may simply have been in use.
2. Restore the file from a backup if you keep one.
3. Move or rename the file, then start RVLTION again. It will begin a fresh, empty history and leave the old file alone.

The file's location is shown in Settings with a button to copy the path, and on the data and storage page.

Backing up and restoring

Your history is one SQLite file. Close RVLTION, copy the file somewhere safe, and that is a backup. Restoring is copying it back.

There is no scheduled backup and no cloud copy, because there is no cloud. Uninstalling does not remove the file either, so an upgrade cannot discard your history.

Copy the file while RVLTION is closed. SQLite keeps a write-ahead log alongside the database, and copying mid-write can capture an inconsistent pair.

Security reports

Security reports follow the same route as other reports: they are handled as part of the acquisition and transfer process, and no public channel is published. What counts as in scope, and what does not, is set out in the repository's SECURITY.md and on the security page.

Briefly: anything that moves clipboard content off the machine, writes it to a log, or stores a secret the privacy policy said to discard, is in scope. Physical access to an unlocked machine is not, and neither is the absence of encryption at rest, which is a documented design position rather than an oversight.