234700 - deleting history entry doesn't remove it from history.dat

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Boris Glawe]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8

If one deletes history entries in the history sidebar, the entries won't be seen
in the side- and addressbar any more as expected. But grepping all files in the
.phoenix directory will still find those entries in the history.dat. 
This is also the case, when I delete all entries in the history sidebar.

The only case, when the history will be deleted correctly, is deleting the
history with options-> Privacy-> history-> clear.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. remove an arbitrary entry in the history sidebar  Ctrl-h (for example ebay.com)
2. grep the .phoenix directory ( grep -r "ebay" ~/.phoenix/* )
3.

Actual Results:  
history.dat still contains deleted history entries.

Expected Results:  
those entries should be deleted, as expected.

Comment 1

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

Did you quit Firefox before grepping, maybe the file only gets written to file
on exit?

Comment 2

[Boris Glawe]

Yes I quited firefox and ran the grep command above. It's still in the
history.dat. I've observed the same with mozilla-1.6

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

Confirmed, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7a)
Gecko/20040221 Firefox/0.8.0+

Comment 4

[chris hofmann]

can we confirm for seamonkey too?

Comment 5

[chris hofmann]

bienvenu,  might need some help figuring out if there is a way for mork to do
the right thing on this one...

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

mork only removes stuff if you do a compress commit - history does a compress
commit when the average entry gets over a certain threshhold, iirc. If you were
willing to pay the performance penalty of writing out the whole history file
every time, you could always do a compress commit, or always on shutdown,
something like that.

Comment 7

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Or at least when someone hits the "Clear History" button.

Comment 8

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

The code is already trying to do a compress commit
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/xpfe/components/history/src/nsGlobalHistory.cpp#1160

(and ditto where this is forked(!) into the birds toolkit)

Any other ideas? Does compress commit work?

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

I believe the reporter said it did work when he did options-> Privacy->
history-> clear, which is the same time we do a compress commit.

Comment 10

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

br & trunk fixed. 

Comment 11

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Adding Jon Granrose to CC list to help round up QA resources for verification

Comment 12

[Jon Granrose]

adding tracy to verify on 1.7

Comment 13

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

verified

Comment 14

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Re-open.  This bug still exists if you try and delete all pages from a host
(click delete on the page "folder" rather the page itself).

Comment 15

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Attachment: Patch

This is a patch against the 1.4 seamonkey branch, but should be easily ported
to forward versions.

Comment 16

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

Comment on attachment 154733 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

sr=jst

Comment 17

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 154733 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Timeless also gave r= for this patch for the 1.4 branch.

a=blizzard for 1.4.3

Comment 18

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

(Note that Ben checked in the first part of the diff for toolkit/ trunk and
branch only.  The second part of the patch still needs to be applied to those
branches.  All of the patch needs to be applied to the various Seamonkey branches.)

Comment 19

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 154733 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

This should land on aviary.  Additionally, it would be great if someone could
also put this on the 1.7 branch and both trunks. (toolkit and xpfe).

Comment 20

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Comment on attachment 154733 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

a=asa for checkin everywhere.

Comment 21

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

landed on aviary (toolkit), 1.7 branch (xpfe), trunk (tookit and xpfe)

should this also go into 1.7.2 or is it too later for that?

Comment 22

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Clearing confidential flag. If history.dat entries were a security problem then
most people, who never clear history at all, would be vulnerable all the time.
This is a local privacy issue, and in fact it's better that the paranoid people
who use this feature have a chance to know about the bug than not.

Comment 23

[Steffen Wilberg]

This is fixed, isn't it?

Comment 24

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

This either partially regressed or more likely never fixed a sub-case. See bug
312036