Bug 26325

Summary: non-trivial to remove accounts by poking around in config files behind MC's back
Product: Telepathy Reporter: Brian Curtis <briancurtis.wx>
Component: mission-controlAssignee: Telepathy bugs list <telepathy-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG QA Contact: Telepathy bugs list <telepathy-bugs>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
URL: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/telepathy-mission-control-5/+bug/462994
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Brian Curtis 2010-01-29 11:52:01 UTC 
Binary package hint: empathy

Uninstalled via synaptic, "completely remove," sudo apt-get --purge remove empathy, sudo apt-get autoremove, sudo apt-get clean, Deleted the empathy folders in .config and .gconf/apps, deleted the .mission-control folder... reinstalled and it STILL remembered my account details lol

Also, no listing in seahorse.

Also, accounts removed via the application itself pop back in on restart of application.

Where are the account details, usernames and passwords, ACTUALLY stored?

Running Karmic.

GNOME said its mission control problem
Reporting from downstream Ubuntu
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/telepathy-mission-control-5/+bug/462994
Comment 1 Simon McVittie 2010-02-02 04:17:43 UTC 
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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