328546 - Allow deleting extensions.rdf in safe mode

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Ed Hume]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060218 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060218 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Themes and extensions often get bollixed up. The fix is to delete the extensions.rdf file. Sometimes a whole profile gets bollixed up. The fix is often to delete the extensions.rdf, extensions.cache and extensions.ini files. Firefox reconstitutes them when it is restarted.

I am frequently telling people how to find their profiles and to delete these files.

Until Firefox is more reliable, we should have a flush button ("problem fixer" button) available in the UI that would delete these files without users having to learn arcane things about their OS.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The users should run Firefox in the Firefox safemode and remove the broken extensions.
That is the correct way....

Comment 2

[Ed Hume]

The point of the Problem Fixer button is that uninstalling the affected extensions in Safe Mode will not fix all the problems. These files need to be removed. THAT fixes it, in a way that Safe Mode does not do.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Ok, so we already allow deleting localstore.rdf, might as well do this too, assuming it's really safe and really fixes problems.

-> Rob, blocking because we need to provide UI functionality for this type of thing.

Comment 4

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

Doing this is a sledgehammer approach that will mask bugs in the Extension Manager code many of which have been fixed.
bug 325175
bug 323826
bug 321333
bug 315245
etc...

What we do need are bug reports for any remaining problems along with the profile's extensions.rdf, extensions.cache, extensions.ini, and the extensions directory in order to reproduce the problems.

I'm going to think on this a bit more but currently this is wontfix. Also, if you are helping people fix the problem without reporting the problem then the code won't take into account the bug they experienced unless I found it on my own or someone else reported it.

Comment 5

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

As is we have missed out on reports of bugs that should be fixed because of this workaround and providing ui to accomplish the workaround will make it seem that this is normal and the proper way to fix this (e.g. just live with the problem, don't report it, etc.). There have also been several bugs fixed since 1.5 where deleting the extensions.rdf would resolve the problem so this shouldn't be as prevalent with 2.0 and there are cases where deleting the extensions.rdf doesn't fix the problem (bug 323826, bug 321333, and others).

Also, in the unlikely case where the extensions.rdf gets corrupted (e.g. it contains null chars) we now remove it with the landing of the patch in bug 324111.

resolving -> wontfix

btw: providing an easier way for people to provide their profile's extensions.rdf, extensions.ini, extensions.cache, and extensions directory would be a good thing if someone wants to take it on.