499382 - Moving profile from one Mac to another broke extensions (due to extensions.cache containing a hard-disk-specific persistentDescriptor)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090619 Minefield/3.6a1pre

After I copied my files to my new laptop, everything worked except for my extensions in Firefox.  They were listed in my Add-ons window, but they didn't work; I got errors like this:

  Couldn't convert chrome URL: chrome://greasemonkey/content/icon_medium.png

Deleting my extensions.cache fixed it.  Rob Strong suspects this happened because one of my extensions was "installed" using the text file method, and extensions.cache stored a persistentDescriptor, which on Mac is a hard-disk-specific blob rather than an absolute path.

My old extensions.cache had this line:

app-profile	[e-mail]	abs%AAAAAAFiAAIAAQxNYWNpbnRvc2ggSEQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADBcRzJSCsAAAAH2LQMY3Jhc2h0ZXN0aWZ5AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABST+ycVnNkYAAAAAAAAAAP////8AAAkgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACWpydWRlcm1hbgAAEAAIAADBcY1JAAAAEQAIAADFZ6bGAAAAAQAIAAfYtAAAbxkAAgApTWFjaW50b3NoIEhEOlVzZXJzOmpydWRlcm1hbjpjcmFzaHRlc3RpZnkAAA4AGgAMAGMAcgBhAHMAaAB0AGUAcwB0AGkAZgB5AA8AGgAMAE0AYQBjAGkAbgB0AG8AcwBoACAASABEABIAHFVzZXJzL2pydWRlcm1hbi9jcmFzaHRlc3RpZnkAEwABLwAAFQACABD//wAA	1245394758	

Re-generated on new computer after I moved the old extensions.cache, and now works:

app-profile	[e-mail]	abs%AAAAAAFiAAIAAQxNYWNpbnRvc2ggSEQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADGXsV3SCsAAAAKtSYMY3Jhc2h0ZXN0aWZ5AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABYWE8VnNkYAAAAAAAAAAP////8AAAkgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACWpydWRlcm1hbgAAEAAIAADGXyfnAAAAEQAIAADFZ6bGAAAAAQAIAAq1JgAKD8YAAgApTWFjaW50b3NoIEhEOlVzZXJzOmpydWRlcm1hbjpjcmFzaHRlc3RpZnkAAA4AGgAMAGMAcgBhAHMAaAB0AGUAcwB0AGkAZgB5AA8AGgAMAE0AYQBjAGkAbgB0AG8AcwBoACAASABEABIAHFVzZXJzL2pydWRlcm1hbi9jcmFzaHRlc3RpZnkAEwABLwAAFQACABD//wAA	1245394758	

I think multiple things went wrong here.  Firefox cached the information about the file at too low a level, and then didn't recover (e.g. by at least letting my *other* extensions work) when it discovered that information was incorrect.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

This is potentially related to bug 344671. If you had the extensions.cache and extensions.ini pre- and post- to attach then it would be useful.

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

The extensions.ini was empty

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: non-working extensions.cache

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: working extensions.cache

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: extensions.ini, directly from the old computer

Comment 6

[Geoffrey G Wright]

I can report getting this problem too. It happened when dual-booting between two Linux distros or after adding/removing/updating Firefox versions. I think the latter. The problem is that often no extensions would be active. Nothing on the UI and they wouldn't work (Greasemonkey) either. Removing extensions.cache would fix the problem.

Comment 7

[Geoffrey G Wright]

Attachment: extensions.cache causing the problem

Uploading extensions.cache which causes the problem.

Comment 8

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

We now use normal paths in extensions.ini so I think this should be fixed