278519 - Prebinding may not be working correctly when trying to work with firefox-bin. Impact on startup speed?

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Alan Ogilvie]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.998
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I usually let my OS X (10.3.7) update prebinding on applications
'drag-installed' (apparently it does this after the target application has been
detected by the prebinding daemon, and then only after the tartget app has been
launched several times). However I decided to issue an a request to update the
prebinding on the Terminal - call me reckless, but I wanted to see if prebinding
had any error messages output.

On the terminal I type:

redo_prebinding -c firefox-bin

This should merely return whether or not firefox-bin requires prebinding (indeed
you can sniff firefox-bin using 'otool' to check if PREBIND was enabled during
compliation of firefox).

I get the following message:

C98329P:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS alano$ redo_prebinding -c
firefox-bin 
redo_prebinding: can't open file: @executable_path/libmozjs.dylib (No such file
or directory)

...and then back to the prompt.

If I apply a recursive update (update_prebinding) and, watch the logs around the
Firefox package directories, I find that prebinding doesn't seem to be able to
pdate Firefox with similar errors to the one above.

Should I be worried about this? (and would fixing these problems, if they are
problems, help the launch time of Firefox?)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Read the man pages for update_prebinding and redo_prebinding (and of course the
shell script that is inside the Firefox package)
Actual Results:  
Prebinding failed on Firefox. (I think, looks like it... but not technical
enough to work that out)

Expected Results:  
Preboud successfully?

I wasn't sure about the 'severity' of this bug, someone more in the know should
set it sensibly. I have chosen 'Minor' as it doesn't stop Firefox from working.
However, perhaps it should be down as an 'Enhancement'?

Comment 1

[Alan Ogilvie]

I noted bug #246283 - which finally 'resolves' the prebinding problem by
disabling it. I'm not complaining - so don't take this wrong... but surely that
_doesn't_ resolve the problem. Just how much does it affect the startup times of
Firefox? So I'm going to leave this bug unconfirmed, rather than delete it.
Perhaps consider re-opening #246283 and move my comments into it?

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Starting with OSX 10.4 prebinding has no significant effect due to changes in
the loader. There is no sane way to get prebinding to work on prior versions of
the OS, so WONTFIX.