Open Bug 921469 Opened 11 years ago Updated 2 years ago

"Reset Firefox" dereferences symlinks when making the profile backup

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

x86_64
Linux
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: Aleksej, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

(Whiteboard: [testday-20130927])

2013-09-26-11-20-34-mozilla-central-firefox-27.0a1.es-ES.linux-x86_64

1. Create a new profile (to avoid dataloss).
2. In the profile folder, create a good symlink (pointing to an existing file) and a broken symlink (pointing to an non-existing file).
3. Reset Firefox (Help → Restart with add-ons disabled → Reset Firefox → Reset Firefox).
4. Look at the profile backup in the desktop folder.

Actual results:
The good symlink became the file it pointed to.
The bad symlink became a 0-length file with +rx permissions.

Expected results:
The symlinks are copied intact.

For example, I use symlinks for the user css files in the chrome/ directory.
Whiteboard: [testday-20130927]
Gavin, who is the right person to look into this? I'm concerned considering it is dataloss.
Flags: needinfo?(gavin.sharp)
Given step 2 (manual creation of symlinks in your profile directory), this is quite unlikely to hit many users.

I also don't understand which part of the "actual results" describe data loss.
Flags: needinfo?(gavin.sharp)
I've noticed a problem with symlinks in a year 2010 ScrapBook save, but they are broken in my other backup, and I have no idea of how they could appear legitimately.

The (probably very unlikely) privacy part was about using a file with a symlink, and expecting its content not to appear in backups of the profile.
Severity: normal → S3
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