47628 - manual changes to prefs.js are clobbered

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 58326

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, defect, P3)

Description

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

i'm not sure when this problem was introduced (matt sez he's encountered it too)
and it is erratic, but when i change pref.js by hand, sometimes whatever changes
i make are clobbered the next time i restart the product --the default from
all.ns and/or all-ns.js are written back.
 
i cannot reproduce this problem using a profile i created recently (eg, using
y'day's or today's branch builds). however, it has occurred with a profile i had
created back on 24 July --was there a bug introduced then that made profiles
created with the 2000.07.24.08-m17 bad? anyone else see this, or could provide
more info?

afaik, this is only a problem for the commercial Netscape6 product (no prob for
mozilla).

simple test case:

0. quit out of Netscape6.

1. go into the profile dir and edit the prefs.js file. f'rzample, i modified the
startup homepage and added a pref to enable the image blocker manager:

  user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.mozillazine.org");
  user_pref("imageblocker.enabled", true);

2. save the prefs.js file and exit its editor.
3. restart the browser for that given profile.

expected results: settings in prefs.js should take precedence. so, the startup
page should be http://www.mozillazine.org, *and* the Images Manager should be
accessible from the menu (Tasks > Security and Privacy > Images Manager) and the
Preferences dialog (Advanced > Cookies and Images).

actual results: the startup page is clobbered back to the shipped default of
netcenter (http://home.netscape.com/index1.html?cp=hom08pr1), and the Images
Manager is not enabled.

Comment 1

[Alec Flett]

are you SURE you've quite all instances of the browser at the time you make the 
change? This code has been pretty solid for quite some time, and nothing much as 
really changed in this area.

Comment 2

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

alec, yes, i made sure that i had quit all instances of netscape before i edited
the prefs.js file.

fwiw, with the recent profiles i've created, i cannot repro this (Mac or linux).
i'd like to keep this open just for a short bit since matt had seen something
that exhibited this behavior... matt, d'you have further info there --ie, d'you
think the problem you had seen has already/really been fixed? or is it another
problem altogether?

thx!

Comment 3

[leger]

Putting on [dogfood-] radar.  Need to reproduce 100% at this stage of the game 
:-)

Comment 4

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

I'm guessing you're being bit by the behavior described in bug 58326 (which is
an RFE to change the designed behavior). The pref code tries to strip out
redundant info by not writing out any pref value that matches the default.
That's fine as far as it goes, but as soon as you start switching between
products with different default prefs (say, Mozilla and N6) you've got a problem.

As you switch between N6 and Mozilla will find that all the places you attempted
to override N6 behavior to match Mozilla defaults will disappear and you're back
to the N6 defaults when running N6.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 58326 ***

Comment 5

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

okay, v.