Wallet dies - Thunderbird and SeaMonkey switch to Toolkit’s Password Manager
Mark Banner
http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/127 reposted here for
information]
For too long now (since somewhere around April/May 2008 at least) I have
had the task of switching MailNews from the old password manager code
(known as wallet) to use the newer code in toolkit that Firefox has been
using for a long time now.
Finally, the day has arrived for this to get pushed to the tree - the
patches have now all landed, although we do have one final change to do
which is to stop pulling the wallet cvs directory into the source tree
when we do a pull.
- What does this mean for Nightly Testers (and users when we release)?
Hopefully no-one will notice the difference, except for a few bug fixes
and revised preferences display. However, as always (especially for
nightly testers) it is recommended that you keep backups your profile.
- What happens if I use the same profile on wallet and toolkit versions
of Thunderbird/SeaMonkey?
When one of the applications with toolkit’s password manager is first
run, it will create two new files in your profile directory,
signons3.txt and signons.sqlite. signons3.txt is an unfortunate artefact
of the upgrade. signons.sqlite is the file the toolkit’s password
manager will actively use.
If you subsequently go back to a wallet version, then it will use
signons.txt and store any changes to your passwords in that file. These
changes won’t get picked up in the toolkit password manager version.
Likewise, if you save passwords in the toolkit version, then they won’t
get into the wallet version.
- Why have we made the switch?
* Provides the same interfaces as Firefox - making it easier for
extensions to work across our applications.
* Drops the old wallet password manager code which was virtually
unmaintained and complicated.
* Increases code sharing (and string sharing for localisers).
* Moves Thunderbird and SeaMonkey slightly closer to being
xulrunner based applications.
* Helps to fix some bugs, and should make it easier to fix some others.
- I’ve got a problem with the new password manager that I didn’t have
with the old one, what should I do?
Although we now have lots of unit tests for various bits of the mailnews
code relating to getting saved passwords and communicating them to
servers, and whilst I really do hope there won’t be any new bugs, I
won’t be surprised if there are some. Here’s what you should do:
* Confirm the bug isn’t in a previous version of Thunderbird.
* Check for duplicates
* File a bug. We’ll need to know: the format of your
username/hostname and if they have any special charaters. We may also
need: a protocol log.
NoOp
> [This is a copy of my blog post at
> http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/127 reposted here for
> information]
>
I've not tested all the 'features' yet, but as a user I can say that it
was an extremely pleasant surprise when I looked at
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/pushloghtml?startdate=24+hours+ago&enddate=now
this morning, saw the 390025 etc entries, updated, reloaded and only had
to enter _one_ master password instead of getting the usual 3 or 4!
Thanks!
Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre)
Gecko/20090116 SeaMonkey/2.0a3pre
Mark Banner
> On 01/15/2009 01:17 PM, Mark Banner wrote:
>> [This is a copy of my blog post at
>> http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/127 reposted here for
>> information]
>>
>
> I've not tested all the 'features' yet, but as a user I can say that it
> was an extremely pleasant surprise when I looked at
> http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/pushloghtml?startdate=24+hours+ago&enddate=now
> this morning, saw the 390025 etc entries, updated, reloaded and only had
> to enter _one_ master password instead of getting the usual 3 or 4!
That's interesting because I've had at least one report of it happening
the other way around (i.e. used to get one, now get 3 or 4).
Standard8
Asrail
> - What does this mean for Nightly Testers (and users when we release)?
>
> Hopefully no-one will notice the difference, except for a few bug fixes
> and revised preferences display. However, as always (especially for
> nightly testers) it is recommended that you keep backups your profile.
Do we have to change something to login on IMAP servers or this just
regressed?
Mark Banner
AFAIK there have been no reports of failures to log into IMAP servers,
indeed I have two that I am logging into just fine (on a profile I
hadn't updated until today).
Have you checked your data is listed in the password manager?
If you have a problem then feel free to file a bug - I need to know
hostname/username formats as mentioned in my main post and a protocol
log would be very useful as well.
Standard8
NoOp
It apparently *isn't* fixed in SeaMonkey (I've not tried in TB yet) as I
reported. I think the one login prompt was simply from SM restarting
after the update. Today when I started SM it gave me the same 4 master
password login prompts... sorry to the false posting.