[Bug 156707] Thunderbird package update lost my profile

[Eric Moore]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: mozilla-thunderbird

I'm running Ubuntu 7.10. I had been running Thunderbird "2.0.0.6
+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 (gutsy)". This morning when I booted the Synaptic
package manager recommended upgrading Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 to
"2.0.0.8~pre070122+nobinonly-0ubuntu07.10" . I let it. The packages
description is "Package to ease upgrading from older mozilla-thunderbird
package to the new thunderbird package.This package can be purged at
anytime once the Thunderbird package has been installed."

Whatever it installed identifies itself as version 2.0.0.6 (20071022) in
the help menu. When I ran it I got the new account wizard (i.e. it
looked like I lost everything). The problem was 100% repeatable. My
prefs.js file didn't seem to be empty or corrupted, and my profiles.ini
file seemed to be okay. I used

thunderbird -profile /home/eric/Profiles/Thunderbird/Tanstaafl

to launch Thunderbird with a command line argument to specify the
profiles location. It worked fine. That verified my profile was still
good. My profile.ini contains:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=46w92tij.default

[Profile1]
Name=Tanstaafl
IsRelative=0
Path=/home/eric/Profiles/Thunderbird/Tanstaafl
Default=1

which looks good. That puzzled me and then I remembered that I had also
installed Thunderbird using ubuntuzilla about a week ago. Since both
packages seemed to use identical builds I had forgotten about it. I was
looking at its profiles.ini which was in ~/.thunderbird. The one from
the Ubuntu official repository which synaptic updated is in ~/.mozilla-
thunderbird. It contains

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=gyxyhaz1.default

That profile is just a stub. Its prefs.js just contains:

# Mozilla User Preferences

/* Do not edit this file.
*
* If you make changes to this file while the application is running,
* the changes will be overwritten when the application exits.
*
* To make a manual change to preferences, you can visit the URL about:config
* For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs
*/

user_pref("app.update.lastUpdateTime.addon-background-update-timer", 1193234032);
user_pref("app.update.lastUpdateTime.background-update-timer", 1193234032);
user_pref("app.update.lastUpdateTime.blocklist-background-update-timer", 1193234032);
user_pref("extensions.lastAppVersion", "2.0.0.6");
user_pref("ldap_2.prefs_migrated", true);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.default.filename", "default.mab");
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.default.replication.last ChangeNumber", 0);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.default.uri", "moz-abldapdirectory://default.mab");
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.history.replication.last ChangeNumber", 0);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.pab.replication.lastChan geNumber", 0);
user_pref("mail.attachment.store.version", 1);
user_pref("mail.folder.views.version", 1);
user_pref("mail.smtpservers", "");
user_pref("mail.spam.version", 1);
user_pref("mailnews.quotingPrefs.version", 1);
user_pref("mailnews.ui.threadpane.version", 5);

I copied and pasted the contents of the ubuntuzilla profiles.ini into
the ubuntu's profiles.ini , restarted Thunderbird normally and the
problem went away.

Neither Ubuntu or Thunderbird has crashed, it had worked fine last night
before I shutdown my system, and I'm not using the default name of the
profile so I'd assume that this problem was due to the package update.
Has anybody else run into this problem?

I'd also appreciate some help figuring out how to control which
executable is run when I have multiple versions of an application. I
know how to do that with XP, I haven't figured out how to do that with
Ubuntu yet due to its using shell scripts to launch programs such as
Thunderbird and Firefox. This makes it tough to determine whose
profiles.ini it should use, among other things.

See
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_profile_that_suddenly_disappeared
for some background information on this general type of problem .

By the way, I had to try submitting this bug report several times, it
kept complaining "There is 1 error" even though it didn't identify what
was wrong. I suspect its because I hadn't erased the full packages name
after I switched to "I don't know". This time I selected mozilla-
thunderbird from the list box.

** Affects: mozilla-thunderbird (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Thunderbird package update lost my profile
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/156707
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