1680935 - "Nightly is being updated by another instance" since 2020-12-04 builds on Linux

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[.]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Steps to reproduce:

0. Boot a Linux distribution. (Mine happens to be Arch.)
1. Download, extract, and run https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/2020/12/2020-12-04-16-21-20-mozilla-central/firefox-85.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
2. Go to Help -> About Nightly.

Actual results:

The dialog states that "Nightly is being updated by another instance"

Expected results:

The browser should update itself.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Confirmed with 2020-12-05 Nightly on Fedora 33. Removed my local instance and downloaded new from nightly.mozilla.org and it is still reproducible. Note that the updates directory is not even created in my instance. Moving over to Toolkit:Application Update.

Comment 4

[Caspy7]

Kinda guessing this is related to bug 1553982 which landed shortly before this was reported.

Comment 5

[Viktor Jägersküpper]

Build 2020-12-04-09-40-05 seems to be the first affected build, I tested the one before that twice. The updater still seems to work in the background, this is in my update log from about:preferences:
2020-12-04-09-40-05 - installed successfully
2020-12-04-16-21-20 - installation not yet finished
2020-12-05-21-46-36 - installation not yet finished (although I am running it at the moment)

Comment 6

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Also affects Thunderbird Daily build.

Comment 7

[tgn-ff]

Comment 4 sounds right. A sem.MozillaUpdateSemaphore-* file is created in /dev/shm which isn't deleted on browser exit. If you delete it before you start Firefox again, you'll be able to update it.

Comment 8

[Ronan Jouchet [:ronjouch]]

(In reply to tgn-ff from comment #7)

Comment 4 sounds right. A sem.MozillaUpdateSemaphore-* file is created in /dev/shm which isn't deleted on browser exit. If you delete it before you start Firefox again, you'll be able to update it.

Confirmed! Then after the update & restart, the file is back and update is back to broken.

Comment 9

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until Sept 2)]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: Julien, should we track this bug?

Comment 10

[Julien Cristau [:jcristau]]

Fixed by backout.