b19 message style problems

[Matthew]

Thanks.

I've not been able to duplicate any font or color problems, but it
certainly seems possible that some font/color problems could occur.
One of the changes I made in the message style updates was to remove
places where a font face or color was fixed and unchangeable. There
are a *few* specific elements that are still fixed because the style
would break horribly with a different font size or because the point
of the variant was to use a specific color for something. Wherever
relative text sizing was needed I used em or ex units.

All styles saw significant changes in the html and css, and in some
cases the whole style was completely rewritten. If Adium is doing any
mix and match between old and new parts, I'm not surprised to see
things break in a spectacular fashion. To be honest, I can't tell
exactly what's going on, except that 1) Adium is loading messages
styles bundled into a different version of Adium than is actually
running, and 2), the messages prefpane often previews one or more
setting that is different from what is specific elsewhere in the
prefpane (e.g. claiming to use Stockholm, but previewing Mockie).

One additional issue here, is that most or all of the 1.4 bundled
styles are not compatible with 1.3. If Current Style Path gets set to
a b19 style and the user switches back to 1.3.x, Adium will beachball
and/or crash. This actually a known problem
(http://trac.adium.im/ticket/7438, maybe also
http://trac.adium.im/ticket/1147 and http://trac.adium.im/ticket/9577,
probably others), though I don't think anyone ever anticipated that
Adium would load the incorrect style bundle. I'm beginning to wonder
if this probably could be responsible for quite a few tickets of the
years that were closed because the problem wasn't reproducible.


Matthew


On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:49, Colin Barrett <colin at springsandstruts.com> wrote:
> Great work, Matthew.
>
> So you're able to reproduce the font/color changing? I tried last night and wasn't able to. What were your STR?
>
> -Colin
>
> On Sep 22, 2010, at 9:07 AM, Matthew wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
>
>



-- 

Matthew