I am using Project Neon which ships daily KDE Software builds which are put into /opt instead of /usr. When I start /opt/project-neon/bin/dolphin inside my regular KDE session, it deletes all my Places entries. I am left with the default entries. The default entries seem to not be touched. Custom labels and the hidden property (I hide the "Root" place) are kept. I suspect the nepomuk start/stop detection which clears the places panel and then re-reads it. And since the project-neon Dolphin is reading from a different settings directory, it will read empty (or other? don't have Places there, and I am not really eager to test it again) places and overwrite the ones in the current session. Reproducible: Always
Thanks for the bug report! Hm, if this is only reproducible with Neon packages, then I'm not sure how much I can help with this. I run a self-compiled git checkout inside my usual environment, and it works just fine so far. I can understand that you don't want to do further testing, but then we have to wait for someone else who can reproduce the problem and is willing to debug this, or we cannot do anything.
I guess Dolphin tries to read bookmarks from ~/.project-neon-kde and overwrites them in ~/.kde. Every other KDE application (except for tightly integrated ones such as Plasma and KWin) work just fine in my regular environment. And remember when I created the patch to cleanup the places context menus? Back then it worked, now it doesn't. I really think it's the Nepomuk thing. Hm, I could backup the ~/.kde/share/apps/kfileplaces/bookmarks.xml.
> I guess Dolphin tries to read bookmarks from ~/.project-neon-kde and > overwrites them in ~/.kde. I don't know why it should do that though. AFAICS, we locate the file just once in the code by calling KStandardDirs::locateLocal("data", "kfileplaces/bookmarks.xml"). I might be overlooking something though. The entire Places issue is a rather complex thing, and I haven't written the code myself. > Hm, I could backup the ~/.kde/share/apps/kfileplaces/bookmarks.xml. Yes, this is a way to backup your Places. If you could do that and check if it's really related to the Nepomuk start/stop thing (I think you can force a start/stop of Nepomuk with nepomukctl start/stop), that might be helpful. Thanks for your help.
Any news about this? Apparently, you are the only one who has seen this issue so far, so I'm afraid the only way to make progress with this is that you debug it and find the root cause. Unfortunately, I can't give any hints about where to look for possible problems because I'm not really familiar with the entire "Places" code.