391284 - Crash reporter doesn't work for Thunderbird on Mac OS X

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

On Mac OS X the crash reporter doesn't work. If a crash occurs you will only be notified with: "Couldn't find the crash reporter's settings." As Scott already stated in bug 391020 the profile location is the cause. We don't follow the system wide default location currently. This is a topic in bug 247973 which was resolved as wontfixed.

The crash reporter is trying to save it's report in $home/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/Crash Reports/. Due to this folder doesn't exist it will fail.  The profile doesn't have to be located at this position.

Should we raise the security to critical or blocker? I'm even not able to get some information if it also happens on other OS.

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Where exactly *is* Thunderbird's profile on OS X?

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

The current profile location:
/Users/%username%/Library/Thunderbird/

The expected profile location:
/Users/%username%/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

Comment 3

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Ok, we can fix this by just creating that full path in the crash reporter.  The downside is that you'll wind up with two separate "Crash Reports" dirs, in ~/Library/Thunderbird and in ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird, but that allows a minimum of special casing.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Ted, shouldn't that also apply to Windows and Linux? There we have an identical situation because we don't use the preferred application data folder.

Windows
=======
system:    %appdata%\Mozilla\Thunderbird
currently: %appdata%\Thunderbird

Linux
=====
system:    ~/.mozilla/thunderbird
currently: ~/.thunderbird

Comment 5

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

No, we specifically allow an empty vendor string.  See:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/crashreporter/client/crashreporter_win.cpp#747
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/crashreporter/client/crashreporter_linux.cpp#464

Thunderbird fails on OS X because it explicitly uses a different base path:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/xre/nsXREDirProvider.cpp#980

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

And we cannot use "#ifdef MOZ_THUNDERBIRD" here to set the correct settings path for the crashreporter?

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/crashreporter/client/crashreporter_osx.mm#473

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

It looks like that was added for Bug 246285 but I can't remember why...:(

Comment 8

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I don't want to add any #ifdef MOZ_THUNDERBIRDs.  We should be removing those, not adding them.  My proposed solution in comment 3 will make this work, it just won't be pretty since you'll have two directories, but it's not like they're terribly user-visible anyway.

Comment 9

[Scott MacGregor]

Your solution in comment 3 is fine Ted. 

Eventually we'd like to figure out a way to set the vendor string so new thunderbird profiles end up in the same directory structure as firefox without requiring existing users to move or copy their profile data to that new location.

Comment 10

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Attachment: patch

I haven't tested this yet, but it should do the trick.

Comment 11

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Comment on attachment 279120 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Ok, finally tested this and it works.

Comment 12

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Checked in.

Comment 13

[jwq]

Thunderbird version 3.0a1pre (2007110903) on Mac OS 10.4.9 writes crash reports to "~/Library/Thunderbird/Crash Reports/". If I read this bug correctly, it's supposed to write to "~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/Crash Reports/" ?