483615 - on startup, when .parentlock exists, user should be told about the file and should be prompted to delete the file

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Chuck Simmons]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.10 (like Gecko) (Kubuntu)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081216 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/2.0.0.19

On startup, when .parentlock exists, a pop-up menu appears claiming the job is already runnning or that the system should be restarted.  This is an immensely silly error message when the user has just rebooted the system.  Rather than having the user run strace to guess which file might be the lock file (which doesn't work very well because .parentlock does get opened) or find an alternative browser in order to search the web for poorly written details about where the lock file exists, the dialog box should explicitly mention the location of the lock file as a 3rd possible reason why the process didn't start up.  Better still would be an interactive system to diagnose and repair the problem.  Running ps to find existing binaries to display to the user as evidence would be good.  Offering to delete the offending lock file might be good.  

Also, remove the part of the error message that suggests rebooting the system.  That doesn't help.  I had just rebooted my system, and the offending lock file still existed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. This should be obvious to a developer
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
misleading pop-up error displayed

Expected Results:  
accurate, fully informative pop-up should be displayed.  Better would be interactive system to dianose and repair.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

As filed, this bug should not be fixed: the vast majority of users won't know enough about whether it's safe to delete the file or not. I'm pretty sure there are bugs on checking the locking process PID in the .parentLock file, and if that PID doesn't exist simply asserting that the profile lock is stale and removing it.