476239 - Thunderbird is not Time Machine friendly

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Bill]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.19 (20081209)

If TB is the active window, and I open "Time Machine", TM is supposed to show TB's window, and I should be able to dig through Time Machine's archives to find deleted mail or folders. But all I see is a Finder window.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
 Try it with a Safari window or a Mail window to see how it should work.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This is a new feature in Leopard and requires specific support for it be added within the application.  I kinda doubt if it's easy to implement, either.  Would be way cool if TB did support it though. :)

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/apptech.html

And as best as I can tell, the API for integrating with it is completely undocumented.  Yay Apple :|

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Yeah, what is the API, and the current state of Thunderbird in that respect?


URL contents have changed since comment 2, so I'm posting the folling FTR
https://web.archive.org/web/20090706213856/http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/apptech.html

Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview
...
This article, the third installment in the Leopard Technology Series for Developers, provides an overview of Leopard's application technologies. First, let's take a look at some new technologies that you can use to integrate your applications with the overall Leopard platform experience.
Integrating Your Application With Leopard
...
Working Effectively with Time Machine
...
Time Machine lets users work with their files as they change over time.

Since Time Machine works hand-in-hand with the file system, and keeps track of files as they change over time, there are a few guidelines you should follow about writing files to the disk. The first is to make sure that temporary files and easily recreated caches and indexes aren't backed up by Time Machine. There are a few locations already provided for this kind of data that you should use whenever possible:
    /tmp
    ~/Library/Caches
    /Library/Caches

These locations are automatically excluded from Time Machine's backup processing. If your application writes data that shouldn't be backed up to a location that isn't automatically excluded by Time Machine, you can flag files as excluded using a single function call. For example, in a Cocoa application, you could use the following to exclude a file:

NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:@"/path/to/file"];
CSBackupSetItemExcluded((CFURLRef)url, true, false);