494780 - Implement housekeeping to remove orphaned tags not associated with bookmarks.

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 431558

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Brian Carpenter [:geeknik]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090525 Shiretoko/3.5pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090525 Shiretoko/3.5pre

Bug 444849 apparently fixed the problem that if you remove a bookmark, any tags that are associated with said bookmark are also removed, however, if you have any orphaned bookmarks from before this patch was implemented, they will not be removed. So I propose implementing some kind of housekeeping that will remove those orphaned tags not associated with bookmarks when a user updates their browser from one version to the next. It shouldn't take more then a couple of lines of code executing an sqlite query to do so. Someone in #places  gave me a snippet of code to do just that, but the pastebin no longer has a record of it, and I apologize for not remembering who gave it to me.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

already implemented in bug 431558

Comment 2

[Brian Carpenter [:geeknik]]

If this has been implemented on Shiretoko, it doesn't work, as I had to manually go into places.sqlite and remove tags by hand that I couldn't remove via the browser because they were causing the browser to hang.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

that happens when you're on idle, could depend on your way to use the browser... on the other side if you don't have a copy of your old places.sqlite before the removals i can't argue if your case was different.

Comment 4

[Brian Carpenter [:geeknik]]

I have a copy of the old places.sqlite that had the orphan tag I couldn't remove except by going into places.sqlite outside of the browser. It's ~75MB.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

if you can compress it, upload somewhere and share the link by mail would be great.
Otherwise i would only need a dump of moz_bookmarks table (always by mail is fine).

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

so, ennds up Brian issue was due to Stumble Upon, it added SU tag to about 7000 bookmarks, when he tried to remove that tag we did hang (we are still slow in removing bookmarks), so he thought the tag was empty and removed it manually.
Later preventive maintenance found those 7000 orphan bookmarks and moved them to unsorted bookmarks to prevent dataloss.
So the only issue i can see is that we are slow in removing bookmarks (bug 432706)

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv