It's been suggested that the changes I made to message style bundle
identifiers are causing the widely reported problems in b18. Based on
my testing thus far, I don't believe that they are the source of the
problem, though they they may be compounding the issues(*). I'm not
done with my testing, but I'm emailing the list because fixing the
root problem is beyond my ability, and I'd like to give other the
opportunity to use my findings while I collect more.
I started with 1.3.10 with two clean profiles (one pristine, one where
the messages prefpane but unchanged). I then "upgraded" to 1.4b18,
first duping each profile to retain the old data. I then upgraded to
1.4b19, again duping the profile. I then re-duped the 1.3.10 profiles
and upgraded directly from 1.3.10 to 1.4b19 just to see if that
upgrade jump was any different. It was not.
Here's what I found:
In the User profile, Webkit Message Display.plist is created when the
messages prefpane is opened. It contains:
<key>Current Style Path</key>
<string>/Users/mneedham/Applications/Adium-1.3/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Message
Styles/Stockholm.AdiumMessageStyle</string>
This key does not change when the user launches b18 or if the user
launches b18 and opens the messages prefpane. Should it? When I open
the messages prefpane of 1.4b19, I can see that Stockholm (the default
style) is using the one bundled with 1.3.10/1.4b18, and *not* the one
bundled with 1.4b19. I don't know if the Current Style Path key is
responsible for pointing Adium to the correct message style bundle, or
if another file is responsible for that (if so I can't find one) I
think I've been told that Adium writes this value out to two places,
so maybe I should be looking elsewhere.
My conclusion is that the reason this problem hasn't surfaced before
is because message style changes have been sufficiently uncommon and
subtle that the standard troubleshooting step of switching/toggling
message styles served to resolve the issue. Since so few users
reported a problem, it was never perceived to be a recurring or
reproducible problem.
(*)My bundle ID changes, where I didn't add appropriate fallbacks,
*would* cause a user's message style to change. The old one is now
"missing", and Adium would select the "new" default. This was tested
and worked fine before the changes we pushed. One place I failed was
in adding every needed fallback. Before starting the detailed testing
above I reverted my changes to the style bundle identifiers and the
fallbacks, but it didn't actually resolve *any* of the issues. There
may be other message style issues besides the current style path and
the fallbacks, but I think they will be difficult to discern until
Adium stops reading to the wrong message style bundle.
As I mentioned, I have more testing to do, but for the moment I need
to actually get back to the work my employer expects of me. :)
--
Matthew
