Hunting Down Disappeared Events — Test Day On Tuesday

We have had a startling number of “my events have disappeared!” bugs in the wake of the 0.5 release. Bugs like 381573, 373439, 386197, and 386734. We must figure out what is going on here. Are these all the same issue? Are they several different issues? So, we’re going to have a Remote Calendar test day on Tuesday.

This test day is going to be different because we’re encouraging everyone to get creative with their testing. See if you can help us find out why these events are disappearing. Take a look at Litmus, and see what we tested there, then think about ways to go beyond that. On Tuesday, we’ll be giving an award for the most creative and effective test, so be sure to add your test to the Test Day Wiki page.

We’ve been doing a great job as a QA team, but I think this issue gives us an opportunity to think about how we can improve the quality of Lightning and Sunbird. I don’t believe that the only solution is to quit our day jobs and work on this around the clock (although that might work).

I think we can find ways to work smarter, to do more with the time and the people we have. Maybe we should look into automating some of the testing. Maybe we should look at the weak parts of our Litmus test suite and fix those areas. Maybe we need to delve deeper into performance and memory leak profiling.

We have started this wiki page for brainstorming ways to improve every aspect of calendar QA. We’re going to take your ideas, prioritize them based on what we need the most before 0.7 and put them onto our revised Calendar QA ToDo list.

We will see you on Tuesday. Get creative, bring us your best tests, and prepare to discover where all those events have gone.

8 comments

  1. I get the feeling this is related to authentication on webdav…

  2. I agree with bvdbos.
    I tried both lightning and sunbird 0.5 from 0.3. I could successfully load my remote calendar from webdav (apache server). The calendar showed the event I newly created immediately, but such event disappeared after restarting sunbird. I checked the log of apache and found that authentication had failed for each event creation. The new event only “buffered” in the current session of sunbird.
    Now, I have my webdav without authenication requirement (recognizing by IP address instead) and the update process of remote calendar goes smoothly.

  3. I only use WebDav (Apache 2.0.58) ICS calendar’s and it is happening only to those calendars that are being updated. After an update, the calendar disappears while the others remain.
    I downgraded lightning to an older nightly build (20070419) and now it works again. Maybe this can give a clue on which changes might be the problem.
    Hope it get fixed soon :)

  4. Alan Schwartz

    I agree that bvdbos has it. For my most diagnostic run at the problem (which seemed to resolve only if I removed and recreated the *stored password* for a remote calendar), see the bug report for 386197.

  5. I’ve seen that with the latest nightly build, after first loading of the calendar it works well, the next reloading of the calendar then the events disappear, and when exit from Thunderbird, it keeps running in memory, I can see it in the task manager, and I have to kill the process manually; when I start again the Thunderbird, then the calendar is loaded normally, but when exit Thunderbird does not unload from memory.
    I’m using Win TB + IIS Webdav.

  6. Are there any results of the Test-Day?

  7. Is this fixed?

  8. I want to store the file of calendar (portuguese version)on a disk (in my network) and i fail, i don�t understand whow i shoud proced
    Sorry for my bad english and thank�s for any help