269814 - add repair feature to Firefox profiles

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 292688

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Ivan Ičin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Currently, if something is messed up in profile, one can try with Safe mode and
disabling extensions/changing themes and if that does not help one needs to
create new profile and copy his data from old.

Unfortunatly, even first action is complicated for many users, not to mention
the second one.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. install some extension that breaks Firefox (I think cuneAform currently does
this if it is not fixed: http://download.mozdev.org/cuneaform/cuneAform.xpi)

Actual Results:  
I need to use safe mode and find extension that blocks Firefox, though on
current example even it does not help due to bug 266965, there are also other
situations when safe mode does not work

Expected Results:  
I should have an option 'Repair Firefox' which saves current state of profile
(except cache) before extension is installed, and then offers to return to
previous state. Probalby, it should also offer auto-record in some periods of time.

Finally, this feature should have an option 'Emergent recover' which creates new
profile and copy data (passwords, history, cache, form data, cookies, etc) from
old profile.

I answered some questions on MozillaZine support forums, and I find that this
problem apears very frequently.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is a fine RFE, but I don't know anybody who plans to implement it. Patches
are welcome, though I would warn any potential hackers that this is fairly
complicated.

Comment 2

[Ivan Ičin]

Maybe at first step only 'Emergency recover' feature should be created - it only
creates new profile and copies files with user data from old profile, that is
not too complicacted.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

dupe or depend of bug 232236 ?

Comment 4

[Ivan Ičin]

As far as I can tell, my idea is not connected with bug 232236.

My idea is to enable user to easy recover Firefox if profile is damaged and some
mechanism to protect user data (which is useful btw) won't help, as problem is
in some other files.

Comment 5

[Ben Fowler]

Even the 'Emergency Recover' feature seems to be rather a large project
to do in one go.

I would suggest as a first step dividing the material in the profile 
directory (the one with a name like 0h638p2f.Some\ User ) between three
sub-directories: 

    settings   - for the users settings: prefs.js and the like
    data       - bookmarks.html, history.dat
    internals  - everything else

so that one would know and can clearly  see that in copying the contents 
of a profile to a new one, possibly corrupt material in the 'internals' 
directory could be left without leaving possibly useful settings and data, 
that ought to be carried forward.

This would be useful for humans grovelling in the profile directory even
if no automated methods were developed.

Thank you for being active on the support forums, I hope that you get the 
fullest help and co-operation here.

Comment 6

[Stewart Gordon]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 292688 ***