473385 - nsLocalFileMac::Remove() sometimes fails during recursive remove for unknown reason

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Networking: File, defect, P5)

Description

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

On the SeaMonkey and Thunderbird tinderboxes (Mac OS X 10.4) we've been seeing random failures of nsLocalFileMac::Remove(). Bug 462269 has some of the specifics of what we've been seeing.

We are running xpcshell tests, where we have an nsIFile and we do:

if (gProfileDir.exists())
  gProfileDir.remove(true);

This has been failing with NS_ERROR_FAILURE.

I first tried working out which files were left, but it was all the files that were in the directories to start off with.

So then I tried swapping to a manual recursive remove (attachment 355400 [details] [diff] [review]) and that has worked around the problem.

There is obviously something wrong here, but the error code doesn't help.

Currently I'm leaving the workaround in to hide the problem and stabilise the boxes - though we are still seeing occasional failures in the extension manager tests which use a similar routine. AFAIK the Firefox boxes haven't had the extension manager failure.

Comment 1

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The original tests affected by this are now gone, and the code has probably changed a lot in the last 10 years, so I don't think there's enough info here that we can anything.