[Karmic] firefox 3.5 bookmark upgrade failure

[Dave Gilbert]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

Hi,
  I've been running Karmic and firefox 3.5 for a while and after an update today (2009-08-15 first since last saturday)
when I clicked on a link in another app it asked me if I wanted to do a bookmark import/upgrade to 3.5; the dialog had three
options, and the left one looked closest to my needs - it read something like 'Keep firefox 3.5 bookmarks'. Since I'd been running ff3.5 for a while and that had my latest bookmarks it seemed most appropriate.

Unfortunately what I got was an empty bookmark list with just what appeared to be the defaults.

It didn't seem to have backed up my 3.5 bookmarks either - I can see lots of copies of my older 3.0 bookmarks but none of my 3.5 version :-( I guess it teaches me that I should have backed it up.

Dave

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

if there is no -3.5 folder, this means the "firefox" folder is the old 3.5 folder.

try to backup everything and rename the 3.0-XXX ones ... until you find the one you wanted.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

also it might be that if you had more than one profile, you are nowusing a different one. check firefox -P profile manager.

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

OK, so inside the firefox-3.0 directory I found another firefox directory, so what I had was:

  .mozilla/
       firefox - what was a blank/bad new set after the transition
       firefox.3.0-replaced - seemed reasonably new - maybe this was my old 3.0 world?
       firefox.3.0-replaced/firefox - That was my latest ff3.5 state prior to the upgrade - and moving that back to firefox is all good.

Some thoughts:
   1) Maybe I had firefox-3.5 running at the point the upgrade script ran ?
   2) I've got a feeling I saw two dialogs and clicked the same reply (keep ff3.5 settings) in both - but I can't remember the order/exact circumstances - I suspect I clicked a couple of links in pidgin that spawned /usr/bin/firefox for each one. Looking at the script I can see that the dialog box is spawned off and then the answer is processed - so there could be two scripts waiting for dialog entries at once, and from the mv's I can see that the firefox-3.5 could end up as a subdirectory of the firefox.3.0-replaced

So I think this script needs:

   a) A detection if firefox is currently running.
   b) Detection if the script has already started running and is waiting for the dialog
   c) Something that stops it trying to do the migration twice on the same set of data
   d) Error checking on the mv's etc
   e) A log of stdout/stderr

I suggest you could combine at least (c) and (e) - if you can get stdout/stderr to go into .mozilla/transition-to3.5.lockandlog and then check for that file existing early on and bail if it does maybe it would be safer.

Dave

[drew212 (mstngdrew212)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu development version (10.04). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect 414139, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[drew212 (mstngdrew212)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

Hi Drew212,
  This isn't really about trying on the new version; this was a bug specific to the upgrade process to the firefox-3.5
from the old version; what it really needs is for whoever is going to do something similar for Firefox 4 to look at this and take the problems into account.

Dave

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox-3.5 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]