Thunderbird icon becomes a red cross when a new message arrives

[Chealer]

With version 0.4, FireTray now displays a nice Icedove icon when there are no new messages. However, when a message arrives, instead of displaying the count, the icon becomes a red "X" on the white background.

I figured out that this bug does not occur if GNOME icons are installed. In a sense, this is a configuration problem. The way icons are configured is obscure, but if I understand correctly, in practice the default configuration points FireTray to "mail-message-new", which is a reference to a GNOME icon. For example, see /usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/actions/mail-message-new.png. FireTray obtains the actual icon through GIO using g_themed_icon_new_from_names().

This is of course ugly, but at least I can still tell at a glance whether I have unread mail or not, which was the point of installing FireTray. A workaround is to install the expected icons (in Debian, the relevant package is gnome-icon-theme). Otherwise, one can choose the third radio box and specify any icon (but there may be a scaling problem with that). For what it's worth, I just discovered how to work around, but so far, I never saw a number displayed on the icon, as I expected.

Besides asking the user to choose an icon if the default is missing, the only solution I can see is to ship the icon in FireTray.

[foudfou]

Hi, thank you for reporting. Sorry, I completely missed your request.
The thing is default icons are embedded in the addon. I believe Debian maintainers do not include them all because of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. So this probably happens because you use the Debian package. You can also download the full version from addons.mozilla.org.

Now I don't understand why you don't get the message count. Note this works only for unread messages (not new ones), and you must select display new message count in the preferences.

[Chealer]

No problem. Sorry for the late reply myself.

The Debian package does ship icons, including mail-unread.png, so the DFSG shouldn't be the problem. As I said, simply installing another package worked around the issue.

Looking at the contents of chrome/skin/, it looks like the solution I suggested is not quite correct. The solution would be to ship the icon in the appropriate location, since it appears that the icon is already shipped.

I have checked that the bug happens even if I install FireTray from Icedove (rather than from the Debian package).

Thanks for the comment on the message count. I will verify what's happening with it once this is solved.

[foudfou]

You were right: there were missing icons in the .xpi. Could you build and check the icons branch (build instructions in the wiki) ?

[Chealer]

I'm not used to building and would happily have avoided it, but tried anyway and failed:
chealer@vinci:~/sources/FireTray/src$ make build
awk: line 2: function gensub never defined
checking version consistency
checking loglevel
make: *** [check_loglevel] Erreur 1

[foudfou]

I was relying on gawk. Fixed that. Could you pull and try building again ?

[Chealer]

Thanks, but I realize I had checked out the wrong thing by following the build instructions literally. I fail to check out the specific icons branch; could you provide the appropriate command?

[foudfou]

Sure

git clone https://github.com/foudfou/FireTray.git
cd FireTray
git checkout icons

[Chealer]

I still haven't managed to build, although the checkout seems to have worked:
$ git clone git://github.com/foudfou/FireTray.git
Clonage dans 'FireTray'...
remote: Reusing existing pack: 4626, done.
remote: Counting objects: 4, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Total 4630 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Réception d'objets: 100% (4630/4630), 2.05 MiB | 1.21 MiB/s, done.
Résolution des deltas: 100% (2240/2240), done.
Vérification de la connectivité... fait.
chealer@vinci:/sources$ cd FireTray
chealer@vinci:/sources/FireTray$ git checkout icons
La branche icons est paramétrée pour suivre la branche distante icons depuis origin.
Basculement sur la nouvelle branche 'icons'
chealer@vinci:/sources/FireTray$ cd src
chealer@vinci:/sources/FireTray/src$ make build
checking version consistency
make: *** [check_version] Erreur 1
chealer@vinci:~/sources/FireTray/src$

[foudfou]

Fixed awk calls again. Could you git pull in the FireTray/src directory ?
If make fails again, can you try make build -n and see where the problem is ?

[Chealer]

Thanks, I managed to build the xpi.
However, I unfortunately can't install on Debian's unstable Icedove (the latest Thunderbird version packaged): "FireTray could not be installed because it is not compatible with Icedove 24.5.0."

[foudfou]

Right. So you need to tweak minVersion for Thunderbird in install.rdf and set it to say 24.0. I forgot to mention previously that your efforts are very valuable, as I can not easily remove Gtk icons from my setup.

[Chealer]

Thanks. I managed to install the file, but unfortunately I don't see any difference.

I thought I may have built trunk rather than the branch, but it doesn't look that way. I verified that chrome.manifest contains the 3 lines recently added, including:
locale firetray hr-HR chrome/locale/hr-HR/

[foudfou]

I'm pretty sure default icons are included. So, at this stage, we'll need to chat: my nick is foudfou on freenode, where can I contact you ? We might also need a VM illustrating the problem.

[Chealer]

I'm chealer on OFTC or chealer@gmail.com on XMPP. I'm not into virtualization but I can grant you SSH access to verify the build.

[foudfou]

Hi, can you give a try to the latest master (7034624) ?

[Chealer]

Thanks foudfou, unfortunately that didn't solve with my Icedove 24.5.0. Note that I had to adjust minVersion again to get an installable xpi. When a new mail arrives, the icon becomes a red X inside a white rectangle, itself inside a rectangular piece of paper.

By the way, the directory containing the xpi built was "build-11fb8b2/".

[foudfou]

Grrr... my bad: the build was not tested. I just pushed a new version.

[Chealer]

http://www.philippecloutier.com/blogpost15