old prism apps just stop working after upgrade

[bgruber]

WORKAROUND:
Edit the .desktop file and change xulrunner-1.9 to prism in the EXEC line

Binary package hint: prism

Apparently, the way prism works changed significantly between the jaunty and karmic versions, and the launchers that i had made just stopped working. There was no warning about this, no error message, nothing. I clicked my old launcher, nothing happened.

The old launchers had an exec line like this:
xulrunner-1.9 /usr/share/prism/application.ini -webapp <email address hidden>
While the new one looks like this:
"prism" -override "/<email address hidden>/override.ini" -webapp <email address hidden>

A separate bug I guess, but "prism --help" doesn't even report -override or -webapp as a possible options. Nor does the prism man page for that matter.

Looking more closely, it seems as if the config data has moved from .prism to .webapp. I would expect there to be, at the very least, a notation in the changelog, maybe a warning that my old prism apps would cease to work properly. At best, there should be something to help me update them.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as Triaged and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better! Please report any other issues you may find.

Also, could you please attach one of your old prism launcher files.

[bgruber (bgruber)]

as requested.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

@bgruber

Would you be able to test the version of prism in my PPA to confirm that my fix works?

https://launchpad.net/~micahg/+archive/mozilla-test

Thanks.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

anyone can confirm that this works? thanks for testing swiftly as we are in final days before release.

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

Does not work for me — after launching legacy app shortcut a "new prism" dialog is opened.

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

Actually, this shortcut still contains old commandline: "xulrunner… etc."

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

Sorry for confusing — "this shortcut" means "legacy apps' shortcut"

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

i don't think this is fixable in a diligent fashion. Prism is a preview technology, so yes, this is inconvenient, but shipping hacks like xulrunner* binaries could lead to even worse issues accross the distribution.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

i would think you can edit your .desktop files and replace "xulrunner-1.9... application.ini" with just "prism" ... maybe check that.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

maybe can ship a xulrunner-1.9 link that points to xulrunner-1.9.1 ... however, we just talked about that recently with release team and we agreed that we don't want to do that ... so I still think this is won't fix and if you can manually workaround that should work.