Re: Firefox: loss of configuration across upgrade
On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 18:37:26 -0400, Max Hyre wrote:
> Gentlefolk:
>
> I'm following unstable, using Synaptic pretty much daily
> to reload the package files and perform all upgrades.
> Firefox was recently upgraded (the last week or 10 days) to
> 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.6-1, but I had an instance running from
> before then until today.
>
> Today I tried to use https: protocol (buying online) and
> was told, roughly, ``Can't do that---SSL isn't available''.
> A couple of different sites acted the same. Finally
> realizing an upgrade might have something to do with it, I
> killed my instance and brought up another one. That one had
> lost all my configuration, cookies, &c.
I would suspect that you had another crashed instance of firefox on your
system or that the one you killed crashed during closing. If you start
firefox again it thinks that the profile is already in use and it
therefore creates a new (default) one.
> Poking around showed ~/.mozilla/firefox had two
> directories: <garbage1>.default/ and <garbage2>.default/;
> the first had my setup. After some futzing around, I
> renamed <garbage1> to <garbage2> and everything came up
> fine.
The second directory is the one created after firefox thought that the
first profile was still in use. The "garbage" part is a random string
which is generated when the profile is created. It is a security feature
that can limit the damage of possible firefox bugs. These bugs might
otherwise allow an attacker to read or even overwrite privileged
information. The protection lies in the fact that the attacker cannot
predict the name of the directory.
> Eventually I figured that profiles.ini had the entry
> ``Path=<garbage2>.default'', and I could probably have
> edited that to have it DTRT.
>
> My question: What do I do from here?
> o File a bug (there's currently none for this
> situation)?
> o Realize this is one of the costs of rapid updates, and
> restart all apps after every upgrade (a pain)? If so,
> must I reboot as well (more pain)?
> o Chalk it up to the phase of the moon and ignore it?
>
> In my latest update (minutes ago), I notice changes to
> such interesting packages as thunderbird, xbase-clients and
> libpam, suggesting, respectively, restarting thunderbird,
> logging out and back in to my desktop, and rebooting.
You only have to reboot if you install a new kernel. All the programs
which run in the background (daemons, services) are automatically
stopped before they are upgraded and restarted after the upgrade is
complete. The update scripts will of course not just kill or restart
user applications. Therefore you have to do this yourself. It is
probably not always necessary to do so, but it is difficult to know this
unless you analyze each program. Problems can arise if some libraries or
other routines are still in memory in the old versions and these are for
some reason incompatible with the new versions on the hard disk. I think
this is the most likely explanation for your firefox crash and the
subsequent problems with the new profile. I always close all my
applications before I upgrade. If there are updates to a significant
number of X packages I also log out and restart X after the upgrade.
That seems to be enough to avoid the sort of problem you had.
--
Regards,
Florian
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