576787 - thunderbird error notifications don't work because current libnotify doesn't allow blank summary (a.k.a. title)

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 561427

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Kamens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100622 Fedora/3.6.4-1.fc13 Firefox/3.6.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100703 Fedora/3.1-1.fc13 Thunderbird/3.1

I've been getting blank error popups from thunderbird ever since I switched to the Fedora 13 thunderbird 3.1 test build.

I spent hours tracking this down today and finally figured out that the problem is that the current libnotify in Fedora, 0.5.0 (I don't know whether this applies to earlier libnotify versions), does not allow the summary / title of an alert to be empty, and thunderbird is triggering alerts with empty summaries.

I made this change to /usr/lib64/thunderbird-3.1/modules/activity/alertHook.js to work around the issue:

    this.alertService
        .showAlertNotification("chrome://branding/content/icon48.png", "Alert",
                               aMessage);

The change is that I changed an empty string to "Alert", so now all the alerts show up with a summary of "Alert".  It isn't ideal, but the alternative, changing the entire alert infrastructure in Thunderbird so that all alerts are specified with a title as well as a message, would be a far more extensive change that I'm not equipped to make.

At least now that I've taken the time to track down and report the problem, you all who know a lot more about Thunderbird development than I do can figure out whether there's  better solution ;-).


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Do something that causes an error popup (e.g., I think removing a subscribed IMAP folder from the server outside of thunderbird while thunderbird is running will do the job).
Actual Results:  
Empty error popup.

Expected Results:  
Informative error popup.

Comment 2

[Jd]

I've had the same problem. Using Fedora 10, libnotify-0.4.4-12.fc10.i386.

The change worked for me too.