294873 - Firefox 1.04 Installer Blows Away Installation Directory

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 234479

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Joseph "What is reality?" Brenner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
Build Identifier: 

On my machine at work -- which runs Linux Fedora Core 3 -- I attempted to
upgrade Firefox from 1.03 to 1.04.  By default, the installer was installing it
in the location it was unpacked: /tmp/firefox-installer.  This was singularly
useless (I suspect that a cron job automatically cleans up /tmp), so I decided
to install it in another location.  The existing firefox was in /usr/bin, so I
entered that as the install location.  I was then expecting it to ask me if I
wanted to over-write the existing firefox binary, so I was ready to click "yes",
which I did -- belatedly realizing it was saying something about overwriting the
entire directory.  I attempted to use this "wizard" to step backwards and make 
re-do this, but it was already too late.  The entire contents of /usr/bin had
been erased, and I spent half a day re-building the machine.  

(Please don't try and tell me this is a feature.  Please don't tell me you think
it's a great idea to have a "Is it okay to destroy your machine?" dialog box.)







Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download installer
2. Choose an existing directory to install it to
3. Watch anything that was in that directory disappear

Actual Results:  
Erased /usr/bin, descended into RPM hell.

Expected Results:  
The software should have either just installed a firefox binary in that location
and not worried about anything else there, or it should have looked at what was
there, and refused to install because it clearly wasn't a firefox-only location.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 234479 ***