282049 - A request for a preference disabling parent.lock

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, enhancement)

Description

[Øyvind Sørbye]

User-Agent:       Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U)  [en]
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 1.0 (20041206)

When TB starts up, it creates a file, parent.lock in the profile folder to the 
user. The purpose of this file is to prevent two instances of TB to run 
simultaneously, both writing to the same files in the profile folder. This file 
is deleted when the user exits TB. 
This creates problems when we are redirecting the user profile to a network 
share. If the network goes down while TB is running, parent.lock isn’t deleted. 
When the network is back and the user starts TB, TB finds the old parent.lock in 
the profile folder. Then the program won’t start and pops up the profile 
manager, asking to create a new profile. Even worse, the samba-server locks 
parent.lock, making it impossible for the user to delete the file. The user has 
to wait for the standard time-out on the samba-server, releasing the lock on the 
file. 
In Eudora there was an option in Eudora.ini, OwnerLok=0, which disabled the 
lock-file. Is there a similar option in TB, or another way to fix the problem 
with a stale parent.lock?
  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start TB
2. Unplug the network
3. Exit TB
4. Enable the network
5. Start TB

Actual Results:  
Thunderbird won’t start and pops up the profile manager, asking to create a new 
profile.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 212132 ***

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

damn, wrong...

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 5

[Ben Claar]

This is still a problem for those of us wanting to store profiles on samba
shares.  There is no workaround for this bug currently as far as I know.

Comment 6

[zug_treno]

See also Firefox bug 307147.

Comment 7

[timeless]

we're not going to disable locking. fixing the locking to work better is a different story. bug 286355 covers a win32 fix.