Running Thunderbird

After building Thunderbird is finished it was very disappointing that there were no fireworks or even a "congratulations your build was successful" message, all what you get is this screen in the picture below :(.


















After running Thunderbird I tested it for the "mailto" bug, and as you can see it is still present.

Easy to follow steps for building Thunderbird on Ubuntu

1. Install cvs:

sudo apt-get install cvs

2. Installing build tools:

sudo apt-get build-dep thunderbird
sudo apt-get install mercurial libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev

3. To get autoconf version 2.13:

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.13.tar.gz
tar -xvzf autoconf-2.13.tar.gz
cd autoconf-2.13/
./configure --program-suffix=2.13
make
sudo make install

4. Get the source:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/
cd comm-central
python client.py checkout

5. To get missing packages such as mesa or header files such as iwlib.h:

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev libiw-dev

6. Create an empty file in comm-central directory and rename it to ".mozconfig"

7. Add the following lines in the ".mozconfig" file:

ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-tb-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"

8. Start the build:

make -f client.mk

It worked for me !!!, I tried to make it as easy as possible without any descriptions for my colleagues who don’t want to get into details of the build :), but if you want to ask about anything just post a comment and I hope that I can help you. Also I would like to thank Eng. Mina Metias for his post about building Thunderbird.

Note: It takes time to download the source code.

Fixing the Thunderbird bug

The first step in fixing the bug is finding it in the source code, in my approach I used MXR (Cross-Reference), and you have to cleverly choose the very specific keywords used for searching, because the source code isn’t small. I used "mailto" as my searching keyword, the code related to the bug was in the mozTXTToHTMLConv.cpp file between lines 194 to 204.

if (aInString[pos] == '@')
{
     // only pre-pend a mailto url if the string contains a .domain in it..
     //i.e. we want to linkify johndoe@foo.com but not "let's meet @8pm"
     nsDependentString inString(aInString, aInLength);
     if (inString.FindChar('.', pos) != kNotFound) // if we have a '.' after the @ sign....
     {
       aOutString.AssignLiteral("mailto:");
       aOutString += aInString;
     }
}

This part of the code just checks if there is an '.' after the '@' sign and ignores a lot of other invalid cases of an email address.

Invalid Addresses
a@.
a@..
a@..f
a@....f
@.
@.com
@a.com
@a
@a.
@a..
@a...com
a@a.a..a

So we must add more conditions to the if-statement in line 199, the first one is to check if we have a '.' right after the '@', the second condition is to check if we have more than one consecutive '.' after the '@' sign, the third condition is to check if the address ends with '.', finally we must check if the address starts with the '@' sign.
So this is my modified code:

if (aInString[pos] == '@')
{
     nsDependentString inString(aInString, aInLength);
     if ( (inString.FindChar('.', pos) != kNotFound) && 
          (inString.CharAt(pos+1) != '.') &&
          (inString.Find("..", pos) == kNotFound) && 
          (inString.CharAt(inString.length()-1) != '.')&&
          (pos!=0))
     {
       aOutString.AssignLiteral("mailto:");
       aOutString += aInString;
     }
}

Unfortunately I didn’t test or patch it :( for a well known reason :D, so can some one test it for me ??