1338922 - Parent.lock doesn't block a thunderbird start

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Rene SATOS]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

I am a Thunderbird user  and to share all my e-mail accounts between 3 PC; to do so I decided to stored my Thunderbird profile  in a Boxcryptor encrypted folder located in my Dropbox on my data partition “N”. All my 3 PC’s have the same configuration from a partition point of view.
When Boxcryptor is started, with of course the right password, a partition “Z” is created with the decode files contained encrypted in the Boxcryptor folder. As long as Boxcryptor hasn’t been started Thunderbird cannot be started because the Z partition doesn’t exist and the TB profile cannot be found; but once started the TB profile is accessible in “Z” and TB can be started as a consequence. Once started the Parent.lock file is available in the TB profile. As a consequence that file is also encrypted in the Boxcryptor folder in my Dropbox, which is updated in the cloud. When one of the other PC’s is started, while TB has been started on the first one, the Dropbox of the second PC is updated with the last level, with a Boxcryptor encoded file containing an encoded TB profile which contains the Parent.lock file. This means that when Boxcryptor is started on the second PC the TB profile, which is on the “Z” partition off the second PC contains already à Parent.lock file, which I have verified.



Actual results:

The existing Parent.lock file doesn’t prevent TB to be started on the second PC. My question is why? What did I miss? Does it mean that there is a bug in TB?


Expected results:

My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the Parent.lock file is generated when TB is started to avoid a double start of TB. If that understanding would be correct then I shouldn’t be able to start TB on the second PC when the Parent.lock file exists already in the TB Profile of the second PC

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Mainly TB expects its files on a local (unencrypted) drive, perhaps even a network drive, although that's known to cause trouble at times (for example bug 1279344).

So you're basically using some sort of virtual drive, conjured up by Boxcryptor.

The presence of parent.lock doesn't prevent TB to start, the start is prevented by the process not being able to lock the file. Surely the virtual folder on the second PC allows locking since it's a second virtual instance of the file.

Comment 2

[Rene SATOS]

Hi Jorg,

Thanks a lot for your comment.