103157 - poor failure mode on bad .mozilla

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: XPCOM, defect)

Description

[Larry Colen]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3) Gecko/20010802
BuildID:    2001080221

Our IT folks don't want us to have our browser caches on the NFS mounted home
directories (too much disk space) so I've got
a symbolic link from ~/.mozilla to /usr/local/lrc/.mozilla

I did something stupid and without thinking moved my .mozilla out of
/usr/local/lrc into /usr/local/lrc/dotfiles

The next time that I tried to fire up mozilla it just hung, then crashed. It
gave no error or any other sign of why it wasn't happy. 
It should at least say .mozilla directory empty or .mozilla, link broken.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.mv .mozilla foo
2. ln -s bar .mozilla
3. mozilla

Actual Results:  [lrc@social lrc]$ mozilla &
[1] 881
[lrc@social lrc]$ killmoz
mozilla: no process killed
mozilla-bin: no process killed
[1]+  Exit 1                  mozilla
[

Expected Results:  It should give some sort of a reason why it isn't happy.

This isn't a bug per se, just a bad bit of design, or a feature that is missing.

Comment 1

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

-> prof mgr:backend for triage.

Comment 2

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

This is not a profile mgr problem but an xpcom (directory service) problem. The
particular case you gave:
1. mv .mozilla foo
2. ln -s bar .mozilla
is hard. Normally, if the product directory (.mozilla for Unix) doesn't exist,
it will be made. Of course, it can't be made because there is a .mozilla (the
broken symlink) in it's place so the create fails with a duplicate file error.
Maybe the thing to do is check for the case of a .mozilla which is a broken
symlink and, since it's broken, delete it and create a new .mozilla. Problem is,
this happens so early in the startup sequence, it may be before we're able to
show UI. I'll have to look into that.

Comment 3

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

-> 1.0.1

Comment 4

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

*** Bug 147241 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Rare case.