366048 - Bad behaviour with directory names starting with a dot '.' (directory disappears)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 229522

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Alfredo Pironti]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060830 Firefox/1.5.0.7 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.7-2)
Build Identifier: 20061207

Each mail account inside a profile can have its own user-defined directories. If the user creates a directory with a name starting with a dot '.', say ".mymail", the directory will appear at first. However it won't be displayed at next restart of the program (probably because this kind of name is about hidden files on Unixes).

The only way to restore the directory is to go through the filesystem and manually remove the starting dot '.' (say the new name is "mymail"), then restarting thunderbird. At this point thunderbird will show up the directory BUT with the old name (".mymail" in our example).
Now: renaming from thunderbird ".mymail" to "mymail" won't work, and ".mymail" will always be displayed. However, renaming ".mymail" to "mymail2" and then back to "mymail" will do the trick.

I think this is a bug because:
- either thunderbird should provide explicit support for hidden directories
- or thunderbird should not consider names starting with '.' as hidden directories.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a directory named "mymail"
2. Rename it to ".mymail". The ".mymail" directory WILL be showed.
3. Close and restart thunderbird. The ".mymail" directory will disappear.
4. Go through the file system and rename all .mymail.* files to mymail.*
5. Restart thunderbird. The ".mymail" directory will reappear (note that thunderbird will show ".mymail", however the directory name is currently "mymail")
6a. Inside thunderbird, renaming ".mymail" to "mymail" has no effect, and ".mymail" will be displayed when thunderbird is restarted.
6b. Inside thunderbird, renaming ".mymail" to "mymail2" then to "mymail" will actually rename the directory.




I'm not sure about the severity of this bug: it is a Minor bug, since there is a workaround to restore directory content. However this workaround is only available to "power users", while any normal user will experience (temporary) data loss, thus making this bug Critical.

I am in doubt, and leave severity as Normal.