Upgrade Lost Firefox ESR

[Ubuntu User]

System was upgraded from Xubuntu 14 to 16 by DVD. It wiped out many things, including the installation of Firefox ESR.

ESR was manually reinstalled, but there appears to be no integration with the former profiles. While they still exist, both Firefox Quantum and Firefox ESR see the exact same profiles. There appears to be no way to remedy the problem.

No crash is involved. If -profilemanager is used in Firefox, the same choices appear in both versions. This was not the case prior to the upgrade.

Description: Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS
Release: 16.04

firefox-esr:
  Installed: 52.9.0esr-1~16.04.york0
  Candidate: 52.9.0esr-1~16.04.york0
  Version table:
 *** 52.9.0esr-1~16.04.york0 500
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathonf/firefox-esr-52/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

firefox:
  Installed: 64.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
  Candidate: 64.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 64.0+build3-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     45.0.2+build1-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1812057/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Ubuntu User (slow-speed)]

 dpkg -S /usr/bin/firefox
diversion by firefox-esr from: /usr/bin/firefox
diversion by firefox-esr to: /usr/bin/firefox.real
firefox-esr, firefox: /usr/bin/firefox

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Firefox ESR is not an official Ubuntu package. As seen on https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf:

  « Please report bugs with my packages to **me** not to the upstream projects. »

[Ubuntu User (slow-speed)]

Olivier, I'm afraid that you appear to be laboring under a misunderstanding. Please note that the issue is not what is supported, but rather the stupidity of upgrade design that wipes out existing programs. There is absolutely no reason to not care enough about users to not leave things alone.

Of course I recognize that I am assuming that software people should care about others. Just MHO.

 « Please report bugs with my packages to **me** not to the upstream projects. »

I don't know what this means. Please explain.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

When you upgrade from one version of Ubuntu to the next, PPAs are disabled, because there's no way to ensure that the PPA contains packages for the version you're upgrading to. That's an expected behaviour.

The quote means that issues with firefox-esr from Jonathon's PPA should be reported to him, not as bugs against the official ubuntu package. I suggest you contact Jonathon (https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+contactuser) to discuss the issue with him. Feel free to engage in a conversation with him here, even though the bug is invalid it might be useful to others who use that PPA.

[Ubuntu User (slow-speed)]

Obviously this has nothing to do with PPAs. This has to do with the system wiping out all the installed programs and forcing manual re-installations.

In this specific case, Ubuntu also damaged the linkages between programs and their data. This is most bizarre because one would have thought that the upgrade process would do no such thing and the strong promotion to do the upgrade would imply to most people that their productivity would be protected.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I understand this is annoying and unexpected when doing an upgrade. Yet this is behaving as implemented. The upgrader should have warned you that it was going to remove a number of packages, with an option to view the list of packages to be removed. Did it not do that?

[Ubuntu User (slow-speed)]

No, of course not. If it had, I wouldn't have upgraded. This is typical Ubuntu methods; no concern for the user. I'll not make that mistake again.