42128 - no entrys in the history

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 27698

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect, P3)

Description

[Niko Pavlicek]

In the Mozilla History there are no entrys! I use the installer build 2000060908.

Comment 1

[Matthew Cline]

Confirmed for Linux build 2000060908.  Someone should mark this as
"OS: All"

Comment 2

[Radha on family leave (not reading bugmail)]

Where are the entries missing. In the Go menu? in the Back/forward 
button pulldown menus? in Tasks-->History dialog? Under the urlbar?

Comment 3

[Niko Pavlicek]

in tasks -> tools -> history.

Comment 4

[ratman]

ditto for me, and i'm using the m16 milestone (2000061311).  win95, installer,
no talkback, etc.

Comment 5

[Matthew Cline]

I think I know what's going on.  It appears that if there's an old
version of the history.dat file laying around, Mozilla doesn't
understand it, and as a result doesn't track history; if you
remove the old history file, everything starts working fine again.
That's what you get for not periodically deleting your profile!

More specifically, in nsGlobalHistory::OpenDB
(xpfe/components/history/src/nsGlobalHistory.cpp), the lines:

    do {
      err = thumb->DoMore(mEnv, &total, &current, &done, &broken);
    } while ((err == 0) && !broken && !done);

eventually end up with both 'done' and 'broken' set to true, so
OpenDB() returns NS_ERROR_FAILURE.  OpenDB() was being called by
nsGlobalHistory::Init(), so it returns failure as well.  This means
that do_GetService() destroys the nsGlobalHistory instance it just
created and returns nsnull, so 'mGlobalHistory' in
docshell/base/nsDocShell.cpp is nsnull, so nothing happens with the
history.

I think that either OpenDB() or DoMore() need to be a little more
forgiving about outdated history file formats.

Comment 6

[Matthew Cline]

Oops.  I forgot to say that for the do/while loop, it also ends with
the 'err' var set to 1, in addition 'broken' and 'done' being set to
true.

Comment 7

[ratman]

i am guilty of not recreating my profile after testing out n6beta1.  so i
followed your advice, and i whacked history.dat out of my current profile; still
no history tracking.  i created a whole new profile from scratch, and not only
was there no history tracking, history.dat wasn't created in the new profile's
directory.

is there a specific line/section that creates history.dat?  is it install-
specific or new profile-specific?

Comment 8

[Matthew Cline]

Sorry, I have no clue as to what your problem is.  I nuked my profile
and started over, and it created history.dat just fine.

Also, I can see that history is working because links are finally
changing color after I visit them, which they weren't doing before;
I can't get the history window to work, so this is the only way I can
tell that history is working (besides doing a "strings history.dat" and
seeing that it contains URLs that I just visited).

Are you using a milestone build, or a nightly build?  I'm using a nightly
build; maybe you should try it.

Comment 9

[Radha on family leave (not reading bugmail)]

Global History...

Comment 10

[Claudius Gayle]

matt, this sounds like a dupe of bug 27698, a bug I have kept around just to track this annoying issue that pops up every now 
and then. Maybe your observations will give waterson some insight into what the problem here is.

Comment 11

[Chris Waterson]

-> rjc

Comment 12

[Robert John Churchill]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 27698 ***

Comment 13

[Claudius Gayle]

VERIFIED Dupe