135859 - Proposed policy re data verification and profile bugs

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 63918

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Jim Avera]

In Bug 119954 [e-mail] asked me to file a separate bug
for this concern. I'm not sure how to categorize it, but here it is:

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1. The code should always do something reasonable when preferences 
are missing or invalid (e.g. print a diagnostic on stderr and use 
a safe default value).  

Programmers are human, and bugs will keep happening as long as Mozilla 
is being improved.  And I hope that will be forever.  So future prefs
corruptions are not unlikely.  But it would be unacceptable to require
"normal" users to manually edit a file like prefs.js to recover.  Such an
event would brand Mozilla as forever unsafe for general use.

Therefore, I propose the following rule^H^H^H^Hgoal:

  If any post-1.0 bug causes profile corruption, the fix must if possible
  automatically repair corrupted profiles for users
  (with notice, and after creating a backup copy of the bad file(s) in
  case the repair code is itself buggy).
  
  If reliable auto-repair is not possible, then the code must detect
  possibly-corrupted profile data and advise the user what to do
  (probably by referencing a URL where the issue is discussed).

  If neither repair or detection are possible, then a warning should be
  issued the first time a fixed version is run after a buggy version which
  is known to cause undetectable corruption.
  (This can be done by keeping a list of all Mozilla versions ever used
  somewhere in the profile, and comparing them against known 
  user-data-corrupting buggy versions.  Normally the lists 
  would be short, and overhead minimal.)

  The intent is to make Mozilla always "reliable" for normal users,
  and never require more than a simple update to recover from bugs.

- -

2. More generally: Values derived from any external file subject to manual 
and/or automated editing (such as prefs.js) should always be validated
so that missing or out-of-range values don't cause undefined behavior.
Bad values should generate diagnostics and well-defined
fall-back behavior, not mysterious UI breakage.

P.S. Thanks for listening.   I mean to be constructive, and I know 
everyone is working very hard

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Dupe of bug 63918 ([RFE] Need a Profile Repair Utility)


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 63918 ***