347542 - Sort-order in "Move to" or "Copy to" different under Windows/Linux f

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[mozilla.org]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060719 Firefox/1.5.0.5
Build Identifier: 

I have prefixed a few IMAP-folders with underscores. Okay, that's a lame solution for sorting folders :-) but anyway ...
Those folders with an underscore appear above all other folders in the "Move to"/"Copy to"-context menu. However under Linux they seem to be ignored from sorting, and instead foldernames are just sorted by the first letter in the folder-name.

Why is sorting different under Linux/Windows, and what could be done to keep the order between both platforms? With a lot of folders on one hierarchy level this is quite bad to work with :-(

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use TB on Windows/Linux with folder-names that begin with underscores.
Actual Results:  
Windows: Sorted as expected - Folders with underscores appear above the others
Linux: Sorted by first letter. So folders beginning with underscores might appearr somewhere between "D" and "F" or the like.

Expected Results:  
Same sorting under Linux as under Windows. (I think the Windows-sorting is like most people would expect sorting to be.)

Comment 1

[mozilla.org]

Any ideas why this happens and what could possibly done about it? This prevents a few people here to migrate to Linux because it makes mail-handling less convenient and that's daily business :-(

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

you don't see the odd order in folder pane, correct?

Andrew/[e-mail], do you see this in seamonkey+linux?

Comment 3

[Andrew Schultz]

What is your LC_COLLATE environment variable set to in linux?  mail might follow that setting.

Comment 4

[Andrew Schultz]

...or if it's not set, what is LANG set to?

Comment 5

[mozilla.org]

LC_COLLATE is not set in  the standard user-environment
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

This is a standard Fedora Core 5 installation with Thunderbird from Fedora, working with an IMAP-account. I see this problem when opening the context-menu of a message and selecting "Move to".

Screenshots can be provided if needed - but I think you got the picture.

Comment 6

[Andrew Schultz]

try closing all seamonkey windows and then do

env LC_COLLATE="C" seamonkey

Comment 7

[mozilla.org]

Tried with thunderbird, and it works a whole lot better. Great!

But still I don't get the exact same sorting as under Windows (and which I expected). Agreed, the foldernames are strange - but here is what it looks like.

with LC_COLLATE=C under Linux:

_0abc
_1abc
__def
__ghi
_def
_ghi


Windows (and expected):
__def
__ghi
_0abc
_1abc
_def
_ghi

(foldernames starting with one or two underscores each!)

Comment 8

[Andrew Schultz]

yes, the sort order for C is numbers, underscore, letters.  en_US ignores underscores.  Mozilla just passes off sorting functions to the system using the LANG or LC_COLLATE settings (that's why Linux and Windows are different).  If you don't like how it gets sorted, then you'll have to complain to GNU or something.

resolving INVALID -- not our fault :)