168196 - Release Notes (1.1 ~ 1.2b) should warn about compreg.dat problems

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Nick Johnston]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

I have been using Mozilla since the days of 0.6. Whenever I upgrade, I uninstall
Mozilla and re-install to the same directory. Recently (and with 1.1
particularly) I noticed Mozilla was becoming a *lot* more unstable. Frequent
GPFs in KERNEL32.DLL or unknown, and Talkback not loading up (despite the fact
that I checked with developers in #mozilla to check that it was installed). 

After doing some research I tracked the problem to the compreg.dat file. Once I
quit Mozilla, deleted this file and reloaded Mozilla, it regenerated the file
and Mozilla has become *a lot* more stable again.

On IRC many people had reported problems with this, and I know for a fact that
there are Bugzilla bugs about it, but as Bugzilla has possible the worst search
feature ever, I cannot find it. (Why is there no "Find this word/phrase in
entire bug" option?) There are *definetly* bugs that mention compreg.dat. 

So as I am definetly not the only person suffering from this problem, may I
suggest that release notes should include "compreg.dat may be out of date, may
require deletion and subsequent automatic recreation by Mozilla" under "Known
Issues". 

Even better would be if Mozilla could associate version information with this
file, and regenerate it once Mozilla is upgraded, or regenerate it at certain
intervals. 

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

> There are *definetly* bugs that mention compreg.dat. 

Yes, there are.  Bug 162593 is the one you're interested in.  The reason it
didn't appear in a standard Bugzilla search is because it's already been fixed
and is no longer an issue.

However, I think you're correct in suggesting that the release notes for 1.1
(still on Mozilla's main page) be retroactively modified to mention this
problem.  (It is fixed in both 1.0.1 and 1.2a so needs no mention there.)

-> Documentation

Comment 2

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

to default.

Comment 3

[Owen Marshall (Not reading bugmail)]

Owen is taking QA for "repeating relnote" bugs. Sorry for the spam; search for
the previous string to find and delete these messages.

Comment 4

[Daniel Wang]

related: bug 162593, bug 171441
-> Asa

Mozilla 1.2b Release Notes documents the downloading problem (but not
international font
display problem)

Comment 5

[Owen Marshall (Not reading bugmail)]

*bugspam*