Fixing Geary After Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

for those who are not using Flatpak

If you have been running Geary installed from the official repo or my PPA on Ubuntu 19.10/18.04 like myself, you will probably find that you can no longer launch Geary after upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which installs Geary 3.36.1–1 automatically.

Attempting to launch Geary from the terminal to get a bit more information on what’s going on, you will find a message some where along the lines of the below:

GLib-GIO:Settings schema 'org.gnome.Geary' does not contain a key named 'single-key-shortcuts'
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

According to the maintainer this is because:

The single-key-shortcuts setting was introduced in 3.35.2, so if Geary’s segfaulting complaining that it doesn’t exist, either a) there’s an old version of org.gnome.Geary.gschema.xml lying around in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas, or b) the equiv dir under /usr/local or `, or the gschemas.compiled file in those directories hasn’t been updated.

In our particular case, it’s because there’s no post-install hook in the .deb to compile the latest org.gnome.Geary.gschema.xml into the gschemas.compiled file that Geary 3.35.2 and above needs in order to run.