159.0 - Calendar is blanked post-update, & my Advanced Settings screens don't match what's described in the support article here.
My Thunderbird installation (159.0/Windows11) has evidently just updated, and my Calendar tab is suddenly a complete blank space. There's a support article here that appears to discuss exactly this situation, and gives precise steps for getting into "Config Editor" in Advanced Settings, entering a long search string, and issuing a Reset command. (Mail and contacts are just fine.)
Which I tried...
But there is no "Config Editor" button in the dialog I get when clicking Advanced Settings at the bottom of the Settings tab, only a mostly blank screen with no list of settings and a dialog box in which one can enter text (with options for "Boolean", "Number" and "String"). And entering the search string given in the support article produces, with a bit of finagling, a toggle that will change its setting from True to False and back again (and a trash-bin icon that offers to delete it), but neither "True" nor "False" produces any instance of a "Lightning" extension in my list of extensions (which is short and uncomplicated), so (a) I can't delete the extension as instructed, because it's not there, and (b) restarting Thunderbird only continues to give me the unhelpfully blank Calendar tab. (And I do mean "blank" here - there isn't even an empty calendar grid on that tab at this point.)
I *think* the article is probably right that my data is still there (I can see .ics files with current dates in File Explorer), but at this point I can't get at it and can't seem to get the interface unstuck.
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Chosen Solution
If you use an add-on called 'Cardbook', disable it. This is a bug that has been reported and they are looking at it.
Just for info: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2086508
I just tried disabling "Cardbook" and it restored my calendar. So now how do we go about fixing Cardbook??
And that's...fascinating.
Disabling Cardbook does indeed restore the calendar, data fully intact, and that's excellent.
That does, however, raise a couple of other questions - neither as immediately pressing, but which the code-wranglers (and documentation folk) among us may want to address in the near term.
First, I'm also using an add-on/extension from Thunderbird Services called "Add-on compatibility check", which "Checks all installed add-ons for compatibility with Thunderbird ESR (yearly updates) and Thunderbird Release (monthly updates)."...and which currently still shows CardBook as compatible with both 153 (ESR) and 159 (Release). This is not *entirely* surprising...if I read the tea leaves correctly, the update that killed CardBook's compatibility went live just within the last couple of days, and the compatibility extension may itself need an update in order to catch the specific bug. [I note here that it has one other extension I'd installed marked as incompatible with 159 and disabled - PrintingTools NG - but I don't recall that one having caused anything like the catastrophic failure CardBook seems to have produced.]
Second, and possibly more significant:
Disabling CardBook does seem to have slightly tweaked the interface of the Advanced Settings dialog/screen when I go back and look - but that screen still does *not* fully match the description given in the support article I found on my first pass through Mozilla Support and discussed above. There's still nothing on that screen labeled Config Editor, and without poking closely I don't see anywhere for a Reset toggle to live. That suggests to me that changes have been made in the Advanced Settings interface since that article was written (or last updated), and if that's the case then the support article should be updated to reflect those changes.
The interesting thing about that support article, though, is that it describes what happened to me (and to LouH) so very closely - and that disabling CardBook worked so very efficiently as to produce exactly the effect the article describes. *That* suggests to me that whatever is presently wrong with CardBook has something to do with precisely whatever it is that the line of settings information in the support article was designed to control. And in turn, that the CardBook programmers should therefore be looking at that article and the relevant line of code as they attempt to stamp out the present bug.
All add-ons are the responsibility of the author. On the addon download page, there are some people reporting an issue in version 159.
You will also find that webpage offers links to the addon Support Site and there is also an email address mentioned on reporting a problem. https://reviewers.addons.thunderbird.net/En-gb/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/
It's likely the author is already aware of the situation as the following link mentions the problem.
Modified by Toad-Hall
Absolutely understood with respect to the bug itself (and thanks for the additional links; I should indeed have a look at those). I have a tendency to come at this kind of situation from an all-sides-at-once perspective, and thus to consolidate comments rather than leaving trails of electronic footprints all over cyberspace.
That being said - is there a more appropriate place to leave a note regarding the particular Mozilla Support article ([https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/.../calendar-updates-issues-thunderbird]) with which I had issues? I do note on revisiting it that its last reported revision was way back in 2018, and that that article is so specifically on point that it's probably getting a fair number of views from other CardBook users right now....
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