736035 - Chat accounts sometimes disappear from the Account Settings dialog

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, defect)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(Florian Quèze in bug 714733 comment #1)

> - Sometimes the "Account Settings..." dialog loses track of *all* IM
> accounts. The accounts are still listed in the "Instant messaging accounts
> status" dialog though. I've seen this only once, but I know Jb has also
> suffered from this problem. We do not know the steps to reproduce so I
> currently can't fix it, if anybody can find steps to reproduce, that would
> be awesome.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

yeah, this is happening to me - it seems to be permanent, not intermittent (by sometimes, do you mean "for some users" or "in some profiles"?)

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Once they have disappeared they don't reappear. By sometimes I mean "some unknown situation causes it to happen". It happened twice to me in 3 months. I know it happened at least twice to Jb too.
It's a serious bug, but I don't have any steps to reproduce, so at this point I can just hope that some tester will notice it soon enough after it happened, so that he will remember what he has done immediately before and will be able to tell us.

If we still don't have any idea of the cause and approach the date of the aurora->beta merge, I guess we can hide the issue by recreating the mailnews accounts when at startup there are chat accounts without associated mailnews account, but I would really like to avoid hiding the brokenness under the carpet.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

would running a version w/o chat after setting up the accounts cause this?

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to David :Bienvenu from comment #3)
> would running a version w/o chat after setting up the accounts cause this?

It does! Thanks! :-)

It immediately "cleans up" the mail.accountmanager.accounts pref of all accounts it can't recognize. The mail.server.server<n>.* prefs aren't removed immediately, but if the user creates another account, they are overwritten.

So I guess recreating the mailnews accounts for existing chat accounts that don't have one at startup is the way to go...
If there are other ways to reproduce this bug, it will hide (rather than fix) them though.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

(In reply to Florian Quèze from comment #4)
> If there are other ways to reproduce this bug, it will hide (rather than
> fix) them though.
Yes, though there's no information loss when reconstructing the accounts, is there? I think recreating them is the right thing to do, if there are other ways to reproduce this bug.

Comment 6

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Attachment: Recreate the missing chat accounts

(In reply to David :Bienvenu from comment #5)

> Yes, though there's no information loss when reconstructing the accounts, is
> there?

The only loss that I can imagine is the order of the accounts in the Account Settings dialog. I don't think that matters.

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/37540bbaf204

Comment 8

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Comment on attachment 608346 [details] [diff] [review]
Recreate the missing chat accounts

[Approval Request Comment]
This fix is required to let users go back and forth between Tb builds with and without the IM feature without them having their accounts half removed when they are back on a build with IM.

Comment 9

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-aurora/rev/0742ec41585a