1264611 - autoconfig specification lacks details

Status: RESOLVED MOVED

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[mathieu.simon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160407164938

Steps to reproduce:

I do like the Autconfig functionality of Thunderbird and I've come across this page with a working example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration/FileFormat/HowTo

The document contains a link "Authoritative definition" leading to the a wiki page:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:ConfigFileFormat

While this page seemingly contains alls existing parameters, at least these parameters don't contain any explanation:

<addThisServer>true</addThisServer>
<useGlobalPreferredServer>true</useGlobalPreferredServer>

Whereas the second option is quite understandable and does in fact make a difference if set to true or false, I haven't seen a (to me) visible difference in the resulting configuration when addThisServer is either set to true or false.


Actual results:

I expected to find not only what parameter exist but also a notice on each parameter what it is supposed to do.

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

NB: I haven't worked on Thunderbird for a while and never directly worked on Thunderbird's autoconfig implementation, but I did work on the FxOS mail app and its implementation which did not care about these things.

Doing a DXR search like
  https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/search?q=useGlobalPreferredServer&redirect=true&case=false
I find that at:
  https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/prefs/content/accountcreation/createInBackend.js#91
it looks like these are used to handle Thunderbird's sorta complex SMTP server setup.

I did a quick bugzilla search which suggests these are v1.1 related, and indeed, it seems that per bug 556729 comment 0 I think these are obsolete and expected to no longer exist in ISPDB entries.  Although they may still get cargo culted.
"""
3. Remove <addThisServer>true</> and <useGlobalPreferredServer>false</>
   It's the default, and also a client/user decision.
   (BTW: Maybe we should handle the case of no SMTP server and then default
   to useGlobalPreferredServer=true? Different bug.)
"""

Any assistance you can give in helping improve the wiki is of course deeply appreciated by all, because I suspect you are not the only person confused by these things.  (For example, I am too! :)

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Perhaps Thomas could do the honors.

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

The spec is maintained by me.

It is actually documented on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Autoconfiguration:ConfigFileFormat :

         <!-- remove the following and leave to client/user? -->
         <addThisServer>true</addThisServer>
         <useGlobalPreferredServer>true</useGlobalPreferredServer>

FIXED