1407357 - Error clearing history, bookmarks disappear - Nightly and Stable Firefox sharing profile

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[m2vihand]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have FF Nightly (firefox-nightly 58.0a1.20171010-1) and FF stable (firefox 56.0.1-1) running on Arch Linux.

I used the bookmarking in Nightly, then tried to clear history in stable (everything except cookies and from the time of installation).


Actual results:

The clearing hangs and does nothing. Even with a new profile. FF still works, but the history clearing hangs doesn't.

When I did this, I had to end the process from cli. After starting Nightly or stable, I didn't see my bookmarks nor I could make any new bookmarks in the bookmarks bar.

Interestingly, my Nightly on Windows meanwhile saw the bookmarks and still sees (I use sync for bookmakrs, logins, add-ons, preferences, addresses).

Running from console I saw this (I use zsh):
% firefox -P test
console.error: PushService: 
  stateChangeProcessEnqueue: Error transitioning state
  UnknownError
^C
firefox -P test  6,19s user 0,59s system 29% cpu 22,969 total


Expected results:

It should just clear the history and not make my bookmarks disappear.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to m2vihand from comment #0)
> I used the bookmarking in Nightly, then tried to clear history in stable
> (everything except cookies and from the time of installation).

Note that sharing a profile across different versions is not officially supported, and anything can happen at that point, since the behavior is undefined.
Off-hand looks like you may have caused a database corruption in places.sqlite. Maybe the process was busy with a merge, and by killing it you broke the merge. It shouldn't happen, but it depends on a lot of factors (the filesystem, the disk, the memory...)

You can try this steps to recover the db
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places/places.sqlite_Database_Troubleshooting#How_to_(try_to)_recover_from_a_corrupt_places.sqlite

Otherwise, just remove places.sqlite and let Firefox generate a new one, you will lose history data. Bookmarks should be restored automatically from the last backup, if the last backup is not the one you want, you can pick another one from the Library Window (Show all bookmarks).

Comment 2

[m2vihand]

Thank you for your help. I didn't know that sharing a profile is unsupported, but it seems really logic. I didn't have any data to recover from the previous profile. I thought that I found a bug, but now I know that this is not one.

Thank you again!

Comment 3

[m2vihand]

Btw. do I have to do anything to close this "bug"? If so, how can I do that?

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I can mark it. You should also be able to modify your own bugs.