1502188 - policies.json being removed on Browser updates

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Enterprise Policies, defect)

Description

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

There have been some reports [1][2] that the policies.json file (in the distribution folder) has been removed after a Firefox update.

IIRC files in the distribution folder are not supposed to be removed during updates.

I haven't confirmed the reports. Emil, could you try to reproduce this issue?



[1] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/enterprise/2018-October/000370.html
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1237979

Comment 1

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

You're right, the updater should definitely be leaving the entire distribution directory alone. It would be very helpful if we could get an update log file from an affected user immediately following a problematic update.

Comment 2

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

(In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #1)
> You're right, the updater should definitely be leaving the entire
> distribution directory alone. It would be very helpful if we could get an
> update log file from an affected user immediately following a problematic
> update.

Where's that file located? I can ask in the mailing list to see if the user is able to get it

Comment 3

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

It depends on the OS, the quickest way to find it is probably to enable the browser console and run Services.dirsvc.get("UpdRootD", Ci.nsIFile).reveal(), then open the "updates" directory. That should show you a last-update.log (for the most recent update) and a backup-update.log (for the update before that).

Comment 5

[:Felipe Gomes (needinfo for replies!)]

Hi Victor, can you take a look at comment 3 here to find the update logs?

I think the path is probably %USER%\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Updates

Comment 6

[Emil Ghitta, QA [:emilghitta]]

Attachment: update.gif

I have managed to reproduce this issue with the help of this report ->https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1237979 (I'm not sure how Victor updated Fx in https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/enterprise/2018-October/000370.html but I didn't manage to reproduce this while upgrading Firefox manually).

Indeed, It seems that the "distribution" folder is deleted after upgrading Firefox via the setup.exe. It seems that the "distribution" folder is explicitly deleted after the upgrade (I tried placing the policies.json in a manually created "test" folder but after the upgrade, the folder is kept).

Matt, will a log file help you for this scenario? If yes, is there a way to generate a log file for this upgrade?

Comment 7

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

The installer *is* supposed to delete the distribution directory, that's expected and intended. Avoiding that behavior requires setting the RemoveDistributionDir option [0] when running the installer; if the users who are reporting this issue are using the installer to deliver updates instead of the built-in updater, then that's likely to be the needed fix.

[0] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/installer/windows/installer/FullConfig.html

Comment 8

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

This is working as designed.