searchplugins installation damaged after natty->oneiric upgrade

[Max Bowsher]

I did a natty->oneiric distribution upgrade today, and was left with "Ask.com" as the only option in the Firefox search box.

The upgrade was from/to the following versions of the firefox package:

7.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1
7.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1

After the upgrade /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/distribution was an empty directory, not a symlink as it is supposed to be.

From /var/log/dpkg.log, I can see that the last upgrade to firefox from natty-updates was a full week ago, so I'm certain that I still had Google showing in the search box before the dist-upgrade. (Additionally, the mtime of the spurious /usr/lib/firefox-7.0.1/distribution directory matches timestamps in /var/log/dpkg.log for the unpack of the oneiric package)

I also upgraded a second system natty->oneiric simultaneously - that one did *not* manifest the problem. The only pertinent difference that I can see on that system is that it had not been upgraded with SRUs for several weeks, and as such still had firefox 6.0.2+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1 installed.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Chris Coulson committed a fix for this, I"ll be uploading it shortly.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This actually isn't critical, just high since it's a big annoyance and highly visible.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Apparently Chris and pitti decided to SRU this. Chris can upload on Monday.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Yes, this should be a 0-day SRU, so that upgraders will get it right away when we announce. I just think it's too late to cram it into final, as Chris is on vacation this week stilll, the fix needs testing, and it's not actually impacting fresh installs and the live system.

[Krzysztof Janowicz (janowicz)]

...and it is one of those bugs everybody will comment on if it does not get fixed before the final release. I am just fighting it right now.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Krzysztof: right, but a 0-day SRU should be fine for that too.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I've uploaded a fix for this to oneiric-proposed already. It just needs approving :)

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Hello Max, or anyone else affected,

Accepted firefox into oneiric-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Any chance someone could test the update today? Then we could even put it into final, which would be nice for the alternates (as you can use them for upgrading).

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

What would constitute adequate testing? Undoing manual fixing of the symlink back to being a directory, then upgrading, on an affected oneiric system? I can do that, though it might take a while, as I'm stuck on a ridiculously poor DSL line until Tuesday.

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

Tested OK - successfully changes a distribution directory to a symlink.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package firefox - 7.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2

---------------
firefox (7.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2) oneiric-proposed; urgency=low

  * We need to keep the postinst magic for the distribution.ini folder ->
    symlink transition permanently to handle upgrades from Natty, as Natty
    users are upgrading from the the same upstream version of Firefox as
    Oneiric, and always will be. This means that we can't rely on the install
    location changing during the upgrade (LP: #869311)
    - update debian/firefox.postinst.in
 -- Chris Coulson <email address hidden> Sat, 08 Oct 2011 01:03:07 +0100

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I also tested the new version, works fine here.

As it got tested now, I copied it to oneiric-release instead of oneiric-updates. That way, the alternate images will have the correct version (so if you use them for dist-upgrading you won't run into this), and we also spare users an immediate large update download right after release.

Closing release notes task, as this is now unnecessary.