706461 - GUI for reordering accounts, servers, ids

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 244347

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Ulf Zibis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0
Build ID: 20111104165243

Steps to reproduce:

I reordered accounts etc. manually in prefs.js



Actual results:

Wrong identities on "Reply"


Expected results:

To prevent users from manipulating prefs.js for that, provide a GUI.

Special accounts such as local should be numbered special, e.g. 0, 998, 999, so we would result in fine pairs at least for:
user_pref("mail.account.account1.server", "server1");
user_pref("mail.account.account2.server", "server2");
Maybe non-default identities could be numbered above some threshold:
user_pref("mail.account.account1.identities", "id1,id11");
user_pref("mail.account.account2.identities", "id2");

Comment 1

[Ulf Zibis]

.. don't forget smtp servers.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We should never re-order those preferences, there's too much risk that other items rely on the prefs as they are currently set. Plus doing it whilst Thunderbird is active is not a good idea.

If you want account re-ordering on screen that's bug 244347. If there are other issues with selecting wrong identities or needing to change things, please file those as specific bugs (if there aren't already) without assuming that changing preferences is the right way of fixing it.

Comment 3

[Ulf Zibis]

Thanks for the duplicate Mark, I didn't find it.
(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #2)
> We should never re-order those preferences, there's too much risk that other
> items rely on the prefs as they are currently set. Plus doing it whilst
> Thunderbird is active is not a good idea.
I understand. Anyway I was thinking about to do such things only after restart + tracking all dependencies.
But IMHO there is nothing against some more reasonable numbering from the very beginning, see: bug 706791