Unexplained temporary freezes in Thunderbird Fedora 13

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 00:26 +0000, g wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> > Do you have evidence of this? If so, you should report it to BZ.
> 
> it is well known in mozilla land that shutting down thunderbird improperly
> can/will/may, and sometimes not, cause corruption.

Any references to this happening on Linux? I'm not interested in what
happens on Windows, it's a completely different situation. The
filesystem API is different (and broken IMHO), the desktop is totally
different in architecture etc. etc. Apples and oranges.

> possibly linux desktops have been written to scan for open programs and then
> send them a kill signal. just exactly what is going on under linux, i am
> not sure.

Neither am I, as I said, but I don't think it matters.

> then again, maybe not, because i do know that if i leave konqueror unclosed
> to maintain tabs that i have open,  when i open kde anew, konqueror opens
> with tabs still set.

Irrelevant. You can't compare a browser and an email client. Note that I
don't claim that no file can be corrupted by a crash, even on a
journalled filesystem. I do claim that a properly written mail client
should be able to deal with it without losing mail. If you feel safer by
carefully quitting your mail client before logging out or shutting down
by all means go ahead. I think it's not worth the effort.

> if i forget to close firefox before closing kde desktop, when kde is open
> again and i open firefox, i get a prompt to clean up and then a prompt to
> open with previous state or new state.

The browser offering to restore state or start with a clean slate is a
user convenience, especially if it crashed because of a specific web
page. In fact some browsers ask you the same question even if do quit
them cleanly. This doesn't affect the argument about mail clients in the
slightest.

> if i have a lock up with thunderbird open and have to <ctrl+del+backspace>,
> or use reset switch to recover, when i reboot, before opening thunderbird,
> i do open profile directory, which is one of tabs i have preset in
> konqueror, and i delete panacea.dat before i open thunderbird. if i had
> any emails open in any folder directory, i go to that directory and delete
> associated .msf file.
> 
> i do this before i attempt to open thunderbird because i know that the
> potential to cause corruption is there. so i stay ahead of game, because
> doing so is not that much trouble and takes less that a minute to do so.
> 
> i do know that i have yet to see lock file but i do check for it every time
> i have an improper closing of desktop.

This is purely anecdotal. You're describing what you do without
justifying why you do it. I use Evolution for most of my mail and it
does have bugs which occasionally mean you have to kill it, but it's
never lost a message. In the worst case it might have failed to update
some IMAP server state and some messages which I've already marked as
read appear as new, or if I was in the midst of composing a message it
might ask if I want to restore it, just as many editors do. I don't have
much recent experience with TBird but I'd be surprised if it were
substantially different.

poc