Bug #16529

Thunderbird: jsconsole is broken

Added by hefee 2019-03-05 16:57:45 . Updated 2019-06-05 09:19:03 .

Status:
Resolved
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
Category:
Target version:
Start date:
2019-03-05
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Feature Branch:
Type of work:
Research
Blueprint:

Starter:
Affected tool:
Email Client
Deliverable for:

Description

The jsconsole (Crtl-Shift-j) stays empty all the time and I can’t enable/disable categories. Also, running thunderbird --jsconsole does not help to have a useful jsconsole.

according to intrigeri: “anonym confirmed that what you’ve seen (and what I see) is not the expected behavior of the JS console (even if there’s no log to show at all). anonym has tried and reproduced this bug. He says he was using that console in Tails in the past and back then it was working”

Subtasks

Related issues

Related to Tails - Feature #15661: Check that Torbirdy does not enable Memory Hole Resolved 2018-06-17
Related to Tails - Bug #16422: Upgrade Thunderbird to 60.5.1 Resolved 2019-02-05

History

#1 Updated by hefee 2019-03-05 16:58:18

  • related to Feature #15661: Check that Torbirdy does not enable Memory Hole added

#2 Updated by hefee 2019-03-05 16:58:44

  • Assignee set to anonym
  • QA Check set to Info Needed

Please prioritize and select the target version for this feature. As I don’t know how import such a feature would be.

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2019-03-06 08:01:50

I think we can prioritize this at the FT meeting (I don’t think anonym alone has the big picture in mind to do so). To prepare this, it would be nice to:

  • have examples of situations when the lack of the JS console will make our life a PITA
  • know whether there’s a cheap workaround (I dunno, maybe there’s an option to ask Thunderbird to log this stuff to stdout/stderr instead of to the JS console)

#4 Updated by Anonymous 2019-03-08 14:13:25

  • Description updated

#5 Updated by hefee 2019-03-12 14:21:56

intrigeri wrote:
> I think we can prioritize this at the FT meeting (I don’t think anonym alone has the big picture in mind to do so). To prepare this, it would be nice to:
>
> * have examples of situations when the lack of the JS console will make our life a PITA

All plugins are written in javascript, so to debug torbirdy/enigmail we need the jsconsole, as it is so far I know the only possibility to debug.

> * know whether there’s a cheap workaround (I dunno, maybe there’s an option to ask Thunderbird to log this stuff to stdout/stderr instead of to the JS console)

I searched a little bit in the I-Net and havn’t found any alternative and no way to use stdout/stderr. (That was my first thought to workaround to be able to debug enigmail without jsconsole).

#6 Updated by hefee 2019-03-12 15:21:21

  • related to Bug #16422: Upgrade Thunderbird to 60.5.1 added

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-02 15:11:03

  • Assignee deleted (anonym)
  • QA Check deleted (Info Needed)

#8 Updated by anonym 2019-06-03 10:47:35

  • Assignee set to hefee

@hefee, to me it seems this bug is fixed in Tails 3.14. Can you please confirm?

Logging is a messy business in the Mozilla source trees, with multiple different systems. There’s some docs:

Personally I think I’ve only used:

user_pref("mailnews.database.global.logging.dump", true);
user_pref("browser.dom.window.dump.enabled", true);


but that doesn’t forward everything that would end up in the jsconsole to stdout (just things logged by dump()). :/ Honestly, when I have debugged Torbirdy I’ve mainly relied on good old “debug printing” using the dump("your text") logging facility. Not that extensions are cached, so if you modify them you have to set the following pref in order to not load an old, unmodified cached version:

user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache", true);

#9 Updated by hefee 2019-06-05 09:19:03

  • Status changed from Confirmed to Resolved
  • Assignee deleted (hefee)

@anonym Yes the jsconsole now looks working, so we can mark this as resolved. May thanks also for those information how to debug Thunderbird.