273625 - NSS_Initialize diagnostics aren't sufficiently precise; regression from 3.3.x to 3.9.x

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 273624

(NSS :: Libraries, defect)

Description

[Chris Newman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6
Build Identifier: NSS 3.9.4

Now that the database filenames are opaque, it is important for NSS_Initialize
with the NSS_INIT_READONLY flag to clearly distingush an error because the
certificate databases haven't been created from other errors.  In NSS 3.3.x the
SEC_ERROR_BAD_DATABASE return code did approximately this.  However, the new
architecture in NSS 3.9.x throws away this detailed error code generated by the
softoken and replaces it with a generic SEC_ERROR_IO error which is not appropriate.

This is a serious problem because reporting a bogus error will generate customer
calls for service which are expensive.  But if I change the caller to avoid
logging SEC_ERROR_IO errors by default, that will make other substantive errors
very difficult to diagnose.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Call NSS_Initialize with NSS_INIT_READONLY flag when no certificate DBs are
present.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
returns generic SEC_ERROR_IO error

Expected Results:  
Return SEC_ERROR_BAD_DATABASE as it used to.

Comment 1

[Chris Newman]

I did a "reload" on the posted page and it generated a duplicate bug...  Sorry.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 273624 ***