Installing Pidgin wipes out my Empathy account settings

I want to confirm this bug but I need additional information. What happens if you decline to import settings from pidgin when launching empathy? Are all your settings gone?

If so then does the installation of pidgin damage your empathy configuration files or just launching the application?

I need to reproduce the problem before I can update the bug.

not confirming the issue I regularly switch between both im clients without issue

I accept Sebastian's comment, I can also switch between them (not without problems though), but the response I got from Empathy when I _first_ installed pidgin.
@Dave: so did you get a similar response?

* I can now see that after I forced pidgin to close, it no longer appears in the indicator-applet, I assume this is the intended behaviour.
* Empathy was set to start at start-up, so it may have been running when Pidgin ran for the first time.

If no-one else is seeing this then we should not confirm it just for the fun of it...

Duncan:

I have not tried to reproduce the bug because I am not clear on the steps needed to reproduce it. Should I just install Empathy, launch it, create a couple of contacts, close it, install pidgin, launch it, close it then launch empathy? Will that reproduce the problem? or am I mis-understanding you?

If there is data loss when launching either application then that is a serious issue that really should be addressed.

@Dave: It doesn't look like anything has been lost. The issue is that on a _default_ and _clean_ install of Ubuntu 9.10 (in which the default IM client is Empathy) if I install pidgin it 'steals' all my IM accounts and details from Empathy. The first time I re-ran empathy it had lost access to it's account settings. I think that the cleanest way to try and reproduce this would be in a VM with Ubuntu 9.10 and see what happens if after configuring and running empathy you install pidgin.

why would pidgin touch empathy settings, it doesn't use mission control and has no logic or handling of empathy configurations

Duncan:

I have a blank VM of Karmic. I will..

- launch the VM
- load Empathy
- use Empathy
- install Pidgin
- load both Empathy and Pidgin

If I loose access to either application then I will confirm the bug otherwise I will mark it as invalid. I will update the bug tomorrow either way.

Sebastien:

I agree but I guess the reason we call it a bug is because there is some unexpected behavior. If there is something going on between Pidgin and Empathy then I guess we'll need to take a closer look.

Duncan:

I am so terribly sorry but I am unable to reproduce this bug. I loaded a VM, installed both apps, launch them both simultaneously then one after the other. Just in case there was something wrong with the packaging I rebooted the VM, uninstalled and reinstalled both apps and tried again. Both pidgin and empathy worked flawlessly. It is possible there is a bug somewhere but I simply cannot find a way to reproduce it.

I have to mark the bug invalid. If you find new evidence of the bug and can reproduce it then I encourage you to post. I am happy to work with you in the future.

Fair enough. Thanks for trying. Closed for now.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!