Closed Bug 1688824 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

When updating the program using the installation executable, policies.json is deleted

Categories

(Firefox :: Enterprise Policies, defect)

Firefox 86
Desktop
Windows 10
defect

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX
Tracking Status
firefox85 --- affected
firefox86 --- affected
firefox87 --- affected

People

(Reporter: underpass_bugzilla, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

Hello, this morning I've updated the program from version 85 to 86 (beta channel) without waiting for the Internet update but using the installation executable instead.

I had some policies defined in the policies.json file and followed the procedure described in this article:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/custom-installation-firefox-on-windows

Maybe it is worth mentioning that Firefox is not installed in the default path.

Actual results:

After having updated the program, I've found that the "distribution" folder and the policies.json file has been deleted. I had to recover it from a backup.

Expected results:

Since the operation is an update (that is, aimed to leave local options unchanged if possible), I think that the distribution folder and its content should be preserved in cases like this.

Thanks.

Component: Untriaged → Enterprise Policies
OS: Unspecified → Windows 10
Hardware: Unspecified → Desktop

This is working as designed (for historical reasons).

If you do not want to delete the distribution directory, you need to pass the parameter

/RemoveDistributionDir=true,false

See:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/installer/windows/installer/FullConfig.html

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #1)

This is working as designed (for historical reasons).

Sorry, is "historical reasons" a good reason to close a bug?

No, I closed the bug because we aren't going to change this.

  1. It's an uncommon case (there are better ways to do policy on windows).
  2. There's a workaround.

If someone submits a patch for it, we would take a look (it would have to just exclude policies.json), but for now, we're not going to fix it.

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