Closed Bug 313422 Opened 19 years ago Closed 19 years ago

Thunderbird hangs on "verifying", when subscribing to a new RSS 0.90 feed

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, defect)

1.8 Branch
defect
Not set
major

Tracking

(Not tracked)

VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: Thunderbird_Mail_DE, Assigned: sayrer)

References

()

Details

(Keywords: fixed1.8, regression)

Attachments

(3 files)

Since Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 it isn't possible to subscribe to a new RSS-Feed!
When doing so, Thunderbird everytimes hangs on "verifying" the feed.

Examples:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf
http://www.thunderbird-mail.de/news/news.xml

In MozillaZine forums, there is a related topic in Thunderbird builds forum.

IMHO this should be a blocker for 1.5 release.
The second feed works fine, but the first does hang. Get this in the JS console:

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIRDFService.GetLiteral]"  nsresult: "0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/Feed.js :: anonymous :: line 213"  data: no]
Source File: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/Feed.js
Line: 213

Feedvalidator says there the first feed contains some bad character:http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fheise.rdf
*** Bug 313651 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Flags: blocking1.8rc1?
not going to respin the release for this.
Flags: blocking1.8rc1? → blocking1.8rc1-
I also tested a variety of feeds and they all were added correctly including RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and several atom feeds.

The heise.de feed fails for me too since 1.5b2, and was fine with 1.5b1. When upgrading from 1.5b1 to b2, this feed causes the whole RSS account to fail to get news.

The feed validator complains about serving the document as US-ASCII (text/xml with no charset defaults to US-ASCII) while the xml is ISO-8859-1, however this doesnt seem to be the cause. I've locally served a copy of the rdf file as Content-Type: application/rdf+xml, which should cause no charset collision, but the feed still doesnt verify.



Is this a regression of bug 306997?
No, it's nothing to do with the URL handling of bug 306997, the problem is that somewhere along the line we've lost support for RSS 0.9_0_, the long-deprecated, reviled, and near-dead first RSS spec, that was useless RDF instead of useful XML or useful RDF. If I can persuade the rest of the feedvalidator developers, before long it will at least throw a warning if not an error, but if there's an opportunity to fix Thunderbird's problem before 1.5final, it would be a good idea: there's still way too much 0.90 hanging around.
Summary: Thunderbird hangs on "verifying", when subscribing to a new RSS-Feed → Thunderbird hangs on "verifying", when subscribing to a new RSS 0.90 feed
The RSS 0.90 spec example, which also hangs on "verifying."
Hi all, 
have exactly the same Problem with thunderbird 15b2 and heise rss feed. Thunderbirnd hangs and doesn't download the rss feed. My second rss feed winfuture.de works for the moment. 

This is an enormous bug, after dealing with i.e. the heise feed a lot of other feeds are somehow ****, they do not update themselves etc. So I had to go back to Beta1 and to create a complete new News & Blogs account.
Assignee: mscott → sayrer
Severity: blocker → normal
Robert, if we have to respin 1.5 for an RC2, there's a small chance we could take a very low risk patch to address this issue with 0.9 feeds. If you think it's worth trying to go after and if the fix is very low risk. 
Hello Developers!

Will this bug be fixed in 1.5 RC2 or final?

How is the status?

Thanks in advance
Yeah, and when is someone going to put anchors in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html so I can link directly to section 1, subsection 2?
The same happens with the following feed

http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/rss
The feed from  heise.de  (URL field above) now mostly validates, except for this warning:
  Your feed appears to be encoded as "ISO-8859-1", but your server is 
  reporting "US-ASCII"
TB 1.6a1-1101 hangs trying to subscribe.

The feed from  thunderbird-mail.de   validates and TB subscribes to it fine.

The feed in comment 14 does not validate, and TB 1.6a1-1101 hangs trying to subscribe.

See also bug 297569.
*** Bug 315314 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #14)
> The same happens with the following feed
> 
> http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/rss

This is unrelated. That feed has an unbound namespace prefix, and is not well-formed XML+Namespaces. Won't fix.
(In reply to comment #11)
> Robert, if we have to respin 1.5 for an RC2, there's a small chance we could
> take a very low risk patch to address this issue with 0.9 feeds. If you think
> it's worth trying to go after and if the fix is very low risk. 

The fix is simple, but I would not call it very low risk. It touches every RSS2 and RSS0.9x feed. It needs QA.
Attachment #202042 - Flags: review?(mscott)
Is this a dupe of bug 313422?
Severity: normal → major
OS: Windows XP → All
Hardware: PC → All
Sorry, I meant "is this a dupe of bug 264482?" ...
>> http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/rss

>This is unrelated. That feed has an unbound namespace prefix, and is not
>well-formed XML+Namespaces. Won't fix.

Can be, but it works ok on FF 1.5 RC1, why ?

(In reply to comment #21)
> Sorry, I meant "is this a dupe of bug 264482?" ...

Nope.

Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
(In reply to comment #22)
> >> http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/rss
> 
> >This is unrelated. That feed has an unbound namespace prefix, and is not
> >well-formed XML+Namespaces. Won't fix.
> 
> Can be, but it works ok on FF 1.5 RC1, why ?

I don't know. Open a separate bug if you want. 

For all the worried Heise-Feed-Users:

I got a mail from Heise, they say that they will provide the news feeds as ATOM-Feeds as well. This should happen before tomorrow. I think using the ATOM-Feeds is a workaround for the problem with the Heise feeds.

Perhaps just asking the provider to renew their feeds might help in other cases as well. I wrote a mail 3 days ago and got the answer today and tomorrow they say there will be the ATOM-Feeds, that's quite fast.
(In reply to comment #24)
> > Can be, but it works ok on FF 1.5 RC1, why ?
> 
> I don't know. Open a separate bug if you want. 

Please don't, it'll just be duped to bug 256430 - Firefox uses the RDF parser rather than the XML parser for RSS 1.0 feeds, and it just silently stops when it hits a well-formedness error.
Comment on attachment 202042 [details] [diff] [review]
Use whatever NS the channel is in for the namespace.

This part doesn't make sense to me.

+    //usually the empty string, unless this is RSS .90
+    var nsURI = channel.namespaceURI || "";
+    debug("channel NS: '" + nsURI +"'");
     if (!channel)
       return aFeed.onParseError(aFeed);

we are accessing channel.namespaceURI before we check to see if channel is valid.

Seems like the null check should occur before the nsURI assignment.  

The rest of the patch looked good though.

I don't know that we'll respin for this bug but once we get it landed on the trunk, I'll keep an eye on it and on the respin state of the 1.5 release. Thank you for working on the patch.
Target Milestone: --- → Thunderbird1.1
*** Bug 315600 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Attached patch updated patchSplinter Review
this addresses the review comment I made to Robert's earlier patch.
Comment on attachment 202042 [details] [diff] [review]
Use whatever NS the channel is in for the namespace.

sr=me, modulo the minor change I made in the subsequent patch.
Attachment #202042 - Flags: review?(mscott) → review+
the updated patch has been checked into the trunk.

Folks who are interested in this bug can help by testing an 11/17 TRUNK build when they come out tomorrow:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/

If this works for you guys then we may consider this patch if we have to respin Thunderbird 1.5.
version 1.6a1 (20051117), Win2K.

The heise.de feed *and* the thunderbird-mail.de feed (comment 0) still causes TB to hang on subscribing, with these errors in the JS console:
==========================
Error: not well-formed
Source File: file:///M:/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Feeds/feeditems.rdf
Line: 1

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIRDFService.GetDataSourceBlocking]"  nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/utils.js :: getItemsDS :: line 222"  data: no]
Source File: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/utils.js
Line: 222
==========================
I did successfully subscribe to the thunderbird-mail.de feed before, and it still validates; I don't know what changed here.


The feed from softwarelivre.org (comment 14) does not cause a hang; TB puts up a "not a valid feed" error box, and there are three errors in the JS console:
==========================
Error: prefix not bound to a namespace
Source File: http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/rss
Line: 144, Column: 5
Source Code:
    <mn:channels>
==========================
... followed by the exact same two errors as the heise.de feed.  Note that for *this* case, the associated folder is created under the RSS account, but the feed is not added.
Thanks Mike. It sounds like this patch didn't improve anything for these feeds.
(In reply to comment #33)
> Thanks Mike. It sounds like this patch didn't improve anything for these feeds.

Hmm, that's odd. I tested heise.de and it parsed fine. softwarelivre.org has an unbound namespace prefix. It will never parse unless we mess with Expat settings.
The heise.de feed WFM with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051117 Thunderbird/1.6a1 ID:2005111704 (though that 04 that the nightly tester tools extension gives is a bit odd, since ftp.m.o claimed it was 06).
I'm not sure what the differences are.  I retried the same build with a fresh profile (thinking of bug 267082), and the heise.de and thunderbird-mail.de 
feeds each yielded a single (different) error this time:
=============
Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.status]"  nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/Feed.js :: anonymous :: line 174"  data: no]
Source File: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/Feed.js
Line: 174
=============
I've tried with 2005-11-19-06-trunk, new profile, and with the following 0.9 feeds:

http://www.gnomefiles.org/files/gnomefiles.rdf
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf
http://www.minut.ee/minutee.rdf

... plus some other feeds that are not 0.9. No problems adding these feeds, and no problems updating them later.

I've noticed that "[x] Show the article summary instead of loading the web page" doesn't work any more, but thats probably some other trunk issue - not related to this fix.
I don't know if it helps, but all of these feed have in common, that they contain the line xmlns="http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/", but this directory doesn't exist (any longer?).

> http://www.gnomefiles.org/files/gnomefiles.rdf
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf
> http://www.minut.ee/minutee.rdf

Thunderbird adds the feed, if this line is removed. Maybe it's that simple.
We've decided to take this fix and respin Thunderbird 1.5 with this. I'm a little leery about why mcow is still reporting a problem with trunk builds that have this fix when testing heise.de, but the feedback from Robert, Phil and Udo imply that this definetly made things better.
will be in the next Thunderbird 1.5 RC.
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 19 years ago
Keywords: fixed1.8, regression
Resolution: --- → FIXED
(In reply to comment #39)
> We've decided to take this fix and respin Thunderbird 1.5 with this. I'm a
> little leery about why mcow is still reporting a problem with trunk builds
> that have this fix when testing heise.de, but the feedback from Robert, Phil
> and Udo imply that this definetly made things better.

I tried again with 1.6a1-1201 and a brand-new profile, and was able to 
subscribe to the heise.de and thunderbird-mail.de feeds without problems.  
My normal profile continued to choke on these (and on the LiveJournal feed referenced at bug 318584).  So I removed the Feeds account from my default profile, deleted the Feeds directory from the profile, and created a new RSS account -- and that works fine too, now: no errors during subscribing.

The testing in comment 36 was with an older profile that did not have an RSS account; I don't have any explanation for the error reported there.

(In reply to comment #37)
> I've noticed that "[x] Show the article summary instead of loading the web
> page" doesn't work any more, but thats probably some other trunk issue - not
> related to this fix.

I'm not seeing that; the option seems to be working correctly, with the 1201 build.
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Verify with RC2 German 
(Version 1.5 (20051201))
Component: RSS → Feed Reader
Product: Thunderbird → MailNews Core
Target Milestone: Thunderbird1.1 → ---
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