266181 - Provide option to reuse old mozilla profiles during migration

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Migration, enhancement)

Description

[Alex Yiu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1


Thunderbird 0.8 installation will automatically migrate all of my old mozilla
mail settings, which is a very good thing. 

My email server is IMAP-based, which has only 80MB quota. I systematically
download those IMAP mail to my "local folder" with mozilla. The local folder is
a directory under another "c:\my_data" which is outside the Mozilla installation
directory but specified in my Mozilla preference. I have more than 1 GB of
emails in my "local folder".

During the migration, it automatically copy this 1GB data into a directory under
my Thunderbird profile directory under "ApplicationData" of WinXP. 

Would it be feasible that the Thunderbird can reuse the existing Mozilla data
without copying the whole thing? 

And, after migration and the startup of Thunderbird, things looks great. But, it
seems to me that I cannot set the location of "local folder" in the preference
screen. I can browse and select another directly. But, after I click OK, the
preference stay unchanged?  

Also, the uninstaller does not remove my Thunderbird mail profile settings. (?)

[Keep up the good work!!! :-) I am one of Mozilla supporters. (I am one of
donators for the NYTimes Ad) :-) Thanks! ]




Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[James E. LaBarre]

OS: Linux (Fedora Core 3)

I can conirm this problem in Linux as well.  In my particular setup, I have my
email in a shared fat32 partition, in order to make it available to both Windows
& Linux.  Currently the Mozilla Mail profile is set up the way I want it, and I
would want to have Thunderbird also use the same location, instead of creating
an entire new set of files.

This is not just the "Local Folders" account either.  I have various POP3 and
IMAP accounts to migrate as well.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #0)

> I cannot set the location of "local folder" in the preference screen. 
> I can browse and select another directly.
> But, after I click OK, the preference stay unchanged?
 
Dup of Bug 2654.
Bug 2654 is written in "Known Issues" section of Mozilla's Release Notes of
almost all releases, but is not written in any Thunderbird's Release Notes.
I don't know why Thunderbird development team want to keep Bug 2654 secret :-)

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Dup of Bug 2654.

Only partially.  This bug wants smarter Import behavior as well, automatically 
changing the path to the mail files rather than copying.  I think this is not 
going to happen, tho -- the problem being that both programs could be running 
simultaneously and corruption could occur.

Comment 4

[James E. LaBarre]

Are you saying the problem with corruption can occurr by running both Mozilla
Mail & Thunderbird *AFTER* a migration which copied file paths rather than
duplicating the mail files?  If so, that isn't a migration issue.  After all, if
I've *manually* changed all the mail paths back to point to the common location
(shared between TBird & MZ, for both Linux & Windows), the *same* situation can
occur, and it would have had nothing to do with TBird's migration.

So providing an option to migrate mail *in place* (by keeping the same physical
location, will do nothing to make the mail any more, or any less, secure; it's a
non-issue.  I've probably caused MORE damage to my profiles trying to hand-edit
 prefs.js in order to work around this shortcoming.

Comment 5

[Jerel Mackay]

I'd like to point out that Thunderbird doesn't even seem to *use* the duplicate
mail it copied...  At least for me.   I was using mozilla 1.7.6 for email.  
Like these other users, I changed the location of my mail folders to a common
area to share them between UNIX and windows.   Running Thunderbird 1.0.2 and
importing my mozilla settings/mail on Linux, it duplicated all of my "Local
Folders" into my new ~/.thunderbird profile.  However, it then proceeded to
reference the original copy of "Local Folders", which is what I wanted anyway,
but why duplicate the entire folder if you aren't going to use it?

Thunderbird should either

1) Not duplicate the mail but use the same path as mozilla (my preference) or at
least ask you if that's what you *want* to do (warning about possible file
corruption, blah blah blah)

or

2) Duplicate the mail into the thunderbird profile and then actually *use* that
copy.

After the import, my thunderbird prefs.js looked like this:

user_pref("mail.server.server2.directory",
"/u/j/e/jerel/.thunderbird/pefe16fq.default/Mail/Local Folders");
user_pref("mail.server.server2.directory-rel",
"[ProfD]../../../.mozilla.common/mail/Local Folders");


I had to remove one "../" from the second line in order to get it to work (but
that's another bug regarding the location of the thunderbird profile).    Note
that these two preferences conflict... The first points to the new copy of
"Local Folders".  The second points to the original location (after it's fixed
up).  The relative directory preference (the second line above) seems to
override the first line, as tests indicate (by removing the Local Folders
directory in the thunderbird profile) that it's actually using the original
location.    I have no idea if these conflicting preferences should be reported
(or have already been reported) as yet another bug.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[James E. LaBarre]

OK, so I did try this with the current (1.0.6) version, and confirm that the
problem is still there.  I moved out my current .thunderbird  directory (you
didn't think I would *delete* it, now did you?), and started Thunderbird to let
it create a new one.

Once it created the directory, I checked the Mail folders.  Sure enough, it had
COPIED all my mail over, rather than using the directories I had over on my
shared FAT32 partition (shared between TBird & Mozilla under Windows, as well as
TBird & Mozilla under Linux).

I would suggest an option in the migration utility to migrate *settings only*,
which would otherwise leave mail/news stuff where it is, and just point to that
location.

Comment 8

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Changing summary to make it easier to understand the bug. Confirming enhancement.

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Not gonna happen. The complexity this would require to explain that to the average end user is just not worth the effort.

Comment 12

[James E. LaBarre]

"Won't Fix" does not "resolve" the problem.  There needs to be a way to **MOVE** settings to a different platform/application.  That means import programme preferences, while overriding the location of the files.  So you can't do it as part of the regular install? Make it a separate application,then add an option in the regular setup to tell it **NOT** to copy over the entire mail tree.  Then it doesn't have to be a complex decision tree within the application, and then merely becomes a checkbox within the profile import to say "skip the file copy process".  Not complex at all.

Comment 13

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

WONTFIX means we're not interested in fixing this bug. 

You can move stuff all you want manually (hoping you know what you're doing), but providing this option would be very prone to problems for a win of what, that you temporarily can save a few gigas? Things like this is not without cost, and might easily cause dataloss when users then later try to run both seamonkey and thunderbird simultaneously and both use the same mail profile files. (And yes, as that would be seamonkey. The old suite is not migrated at all since a long time ago.)

Comment 14

[James E. LaBarre]

NO, Seamonkey updated to the newer code quite some time ago.  You should check the latest code.  I have **manually** done a shared profile with no problem (even a shared profile between Linux and MSWindows with no data loss, but as I have likely said before, it's a ****SERIOUS**** PITA to set up and maintain, taking a lot of manual editing, and testing that TB hasn't decided to go ahead with it's own settings despite being ordered to do otherwise.  Forced to choose between a TB/FF combination and Seamonkey, I would go with Seamonkey, since FF has become severely less stable as of late (and I expect the bad code in FF is making it's way into TB).
    
I suspect "WontFix" is more likely spelled "Can'tFix"