Personal information is not saved between sessions

i cannot reproduce this bug with gtalk in ubuntu 10.10 are you still facing this issue?

Yes, nothing has fixed it as far as I know. After I posted this report I switched to Pidgin and noticed some strange behaviour. Whilst testing Empathy, I changed my name to Tester, to see what affect it had on the underlying XML (none, apparently). Then in Pidgin, when I spoke to other users, they saw my name as Tester, though I couldn't see it in Pidgin itself. Seems to be some crossover in the configuration files.

I don't think that's related.. but anyway. Are there any particular config files you'd like me to check out?

I don't even have to reboot. As soon as I close the "Personal Information" window, it resets. The change is completely ignored.

I wonder if this is related to being connected from both my desktop and my laptop. They're both logged in as the same Jabber user, and I can't give my laptop another alias. On my desktop it's "colan", while my laptop is defaulting to "colan@...". I'd like to set it to "colan-laptop", but it won't let me.

I'm experiencing the same problem but for me alias changes stay until i log out of MSN. (Empathy on maverick on both, laptop and desktop)

@Nils: Maybe you would be more interested in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/telepathy-butterfly/+bug/326321?

@colan, I've run into this problem as well. I have only logged in using one computer (ever) and am seeing the same problem as you, where the alias changes back after clicking the 'Close' button.

What is even more troubling is that editing ~/.mission-control/accounts/accounts.cfg to use a different alias/nickname has no effect. When Empathy is restarted, the original alias is back, and is written to that file again.

Here's a capture of Empathy's debug output when changing an Alias

To reproduce:
Edit->Personal Information
Clear Debug log
Change Alias
Click 'Close'
Edit->Personal Information
Click 'Close'

The attached output corresponds to those steps.

No movement on this in months? Am I correct in that it's an issue of whatever is supposed to set the alias to begin with is setting it every time, even after a change?

I see a few corrections for this.
1. Add a toggle that controls weather the user has set the alias or if the alias is under automatic control. This is likely the easiest to code.
2. Make the function that sets the default be a signal handler called only by the function that assigns the storage location of the alias. In this case the allocation of the storage location would need to be delayed until after the alias can be determined pragmatically.
3. Have the storage assignment set a non-sensible/internal default value like "Alias unaltered" and have any automatic setting of the alias be conditional on the alias being set to that value. The downside here is that there is a single alias that the user is unable to make use of, if NULL and UNSET are distinguishable then it's better to use one of these(like UNSET).

Each have there pros and cons, but any such automatic assignment of a configuration parameter should follow one of these guidelines.