[Bug 26325] non-trivial to remove accounts by poking around in config files behind MC's back

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26325


Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |NOTABUG
            Summary|account details unremovable |non-trivial to remove
                   |                            |accounts by poking around in
                   |                            |config files behind MC's
                   |                            |back




--- Comment #1 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk>  2010-02-02 04:17:43 PST ---
Account details are in ~/.mission-control/accounts/accounts.cfg, except
passwords and other secrets which are in gnome-keyring (if you have it), and
avatar images which are in subdirectories of ~/.mission-control/accounts.

I suspect that the problem is that the original reporter deleted the underlying
files (only), but MC was still running (so the accounts were in memory). Next
time something relevant to those accounts happened, it wrote out its
configuration to the files, and they reappeared.

The only supported way to remove accounts from MC is to remove them via its
D-Bus API, for which several UIs exist (including Empathy). I do not consider
deleting files directly to be a supported action.[1]

The Empathy accounts UI is the recommended user-friendly way to make that
happen (in the version I'm running, each account in the list has a trash-can
icon on the right side, which deletes it). The "remove" subcommand in
/usr/bin/mc-tool is a less user-friendly way to do the same thing.

With my Debian hat on, removing user data on purge would be a release-critical
(grave) bug. Purging a package removes it at the system level, but does not and
should not remove individual users' data.

[1] Coincidentally, it works if you go offline in Empathy, then kill the
mission-control-5 process (or log out and back in), *then* delete the files,
but this is not guaranteed for future versions.


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