Thunderbird 0.9_2 Stalls at Startup

[William Bloom]

I upgraded my FreeBSD/GNOME desktop from 5.2.1 to 5.3 early last week, refreshed 
my ports collection, upgraded from XFree86 to Xorg.  I added the recommended 
libc_r/libpthread entries into libmap.conf for the sake of the already existing 
ports that had some library references to libc_r.  All was well so far, no major 
problems.  I upgraded a few ports, including firefox.  Again, this all worked 
out albeit I was briefly stymied by the firefox Xvfb extension/theme 
auto-registration issues that have been the cause of a few other postings in 
this list.

But my luck turned sour when I upgraded my thunderbird port to 0.9_2.  The new 
thunderbird would start, seemingly display the IMAP authentication panel 
briefly, almost too fast to see, then churn its busy cursor until I killed it. 
This behavior was repeatable even when I renamed my ~/.thunderbird directory to 
give thunderbird a clean slate, so the problem wasn't in my .thunderbird contents.

Interestingly, the package from ftp.freebsd.org (5-stable) installed and ran 
fine.  Being concerned that something might be fundamentally wrong with my 
desktop build environment, I looked at the differences between the downloaded 
package and my build.

What I discovered is that my own build of thunderbird had created a GNOME 
component during the build (libmozgnome.so), which was installed in...

   /usr/X11R6/lib/thunderbird/lib/thunderbird-0.9/components/

The downloaded package did -not- have this component.  Experimentally, I deleted 
libmozgnome.so and found that the oddball startup-and-stall problem vanished and 
thunderbird has been working just fine ever since.

I know I'm working with a thunderbird that's had a revision or so since the 
package was built.  I see from a brief perusal of the sources that the 
libmozgnome.so component is only built under certain conditions (certain GNOME 
libraries/features are checked and must all be present).  I'm guessing that the 
downloadable package must either been built in the absence of one or more of 
these libraries -or- the port revision from which that package was built had not 
enabled GNOME component support.  My GNOME ports were last brought up-to-date 
about six weeks ago.   Also, I notice that the libmozgnome.so component 
(toolkit/components/gnome in the thunderbird mozilla source tree) is fairly new; 
it showed up in version 0.8 (I never used that version).

Anyone else seen this problem?

Looks like the purpose of libmozgnome.so is to add support for GNOME VFS and Gconf.


Bill
-- 
William Bloom <wbloom at eldocomp.com> (602) 604-3100
Eldorado Computing, Inc.  5353 North 16th Street, Suite 400
Phoenix, Az 85016  http://www.eldocomp.com

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