1599602 - Lightning: Do not assume that a scheduling user who has CalDAV-OUTBOx does have CalDAV-INBOX

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Provider: CalDAV, defect)

Description

[Дилян Палаузов]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0 Safari/605.1.15 Epiphany/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Per https://github.com/jobisoft/DAV-4-TbSync/issues/177#issuecomment-558790715 , when setting up an account for nobody (either just with hostname or with anonymous@domain ) user in TbSync/DAV-4-TbSync, the createt pseudo user can have Scheduling-OUTBOX, as it can make sense to query for FREEBUSY information of other users, if this information is intentionally not proteced by password.

However for the anonymous user it makes no sense to have Scheduling-INBOX.

The code in Lightning assumes, that if there is only one calendar-home-set then the user must have Scheduling-INBOX. This is first incorrect. If a user has Scheduling-INBOX then it can have several homesets and probably the user can have no home-sets but still have a scheduling-outbox or Inbox.

So the work-around is to return one more empty home-set and then Lightning just fetches the data.

Comment 1

[Дилян Палаузов]

Attachment: pr1599602.patch

I use Thunderbird 78.8.0. I unzipped omni.ja, modified as shown in the attachment, zipped again omni.ja and now it works.

Rationale: my system offers unauthenticated CalDAV access (no WWW-Authorization headers are set). The unauthenticated user gets one calendar-home-set in the answer, one schedule-outbox-URL (as the unauthenticated user is in theory entitled to query the free busy status of some users), but no schedule-inbox-URL. This lead to calling “this.mInboxUrl = createBoxUrl(null)” which threw an exception.

• Handle the case, when a CalDAV user has no scheduling-inbox
• e.g. by setting mShouldPollInbox to false

I will appreciate very much if the fix in included in the next minor release.

Comment 2

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Attachment: 1599602-caldav-no-inbox-url.diff

I've updated your patch and approved it to land.

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/7f0f8ea65128
Do not assume the presence of a CalDAV inbox URL. r=darktrojan

Comment 4

[Дилян Палаузов]

Can this be backported to ESR78?

I want to offer anonymour CalDAV access to calenders, but due to this bug, the CalDAV server currently has to return two calendar-home-sets. The second calendar-home-set must be returned, but can be empty. Iterating over the empty calendar-home-set is extra HTTP calls, both for server and client. These calls are done by all CalDAV clients (not only TB), as the server returns two calendar-home-sets. I want to avoid these extra PROPFIND calls on the empty calendar-home-set. The proposed patch does avoid them.

Therefore I ask to backport the change to ESR.

The change is really minimal.

Comment 5

[Дилян Палаузов]

I kindly ask to backport this trivial fix to ESR78. Using open standards with open source software is a chicken-egg problem. To get it working under Thunderbird 78, the server has to return two calendar-home-sets. When Apple devices see two calendar-home-sets, they handle the first one and ignore the others.

So to get this all working, under Thunderbind ESR and Apple, the server has to return two calendar-home-sets and all the content must be in the first calendar-home-set, while the second calendar-home-set is ignored by Apple. but required by TB78. It is really very hard to build a server, that works around bugs in all CalDAV clients.

Comment 6

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Please don't change the status of bugs. Use the "request information from" box at the bottom. I'll request uplift to 78 now.

Comment 7

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Comment on attachment 9207666 [details] [diff] [review]
1599602-caldav-no-inbox-url.diff

[Approval Request Comment]
Regression caused by (bug #):
User impact if declined: Just a bug fix for some configurations of calendar
Testing completed (on c-c, etc.): Will be in 88 beta
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): Very little.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9207666 [details] [diff] [review]
1599602-caldav-no-inbox-url.diff

[Triage Comment]
Approved for esr78

Comment 9

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 78.9.1:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr78/rev/48cf6715ae8e