516098 - Weave sync fails without any obvious reason, when I've upgraded one machine but not another

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
 1. Set up a Weave account using an "old" version -- e.g. 0.6 or 0.7pre1
 2. Upgrade *one* of your machines to 0.7pre2, and re-sync that machine with Weave
 3. Attempt a sync on a different machine

EXPECTED RESULTS:
  - Weave should notify me that the sync has failed *because this machine is using an older version of the Weave client than another of my machines*.

ACTUAL RESULTS:
  - Weave's sync dialog stays at "Starting sync engine", and gets a red "x".  (see screenshot.)  The dialog just stays like that, with the progress bar never going anywhere.
  - Weave's notification icon appears in tray, with the message "Error While Syncing / Weave encountered an error while syncing. You might want to try syncing manually to make sure you are up-to-date."

(Note that "syncing manually" doesn't help at all in this situation -- it will make the user run into the same error over and over)

NOTE: If I look in the Weave Activity log, I *do* see a line saying "Server data is of a newer Weave version, this client needs to be upgraded.  Aborting sync."  This is helpful; however, logging the error doesn't really count as notifying the user. :)  This should ideally be mentioned in the status-bar-notification, and/or on the sync dialog next to the red "x".

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of sync dialog when this happens

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(Note that this isn't a new problem with 0.7pre2 -- I'm pretty sure I ran into this same issue when I upgraded from 0.6 to 0.7pre1, too)

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

We set Status.sync = DESKTOP_VERSION_OUT_OF_DATE and trigger a throw so service:error should be notified, so we need to check that and show it somehow.

On Firefox, we show the warning notification but on fennec nothing is shown.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

FWIW, this is still a problem, as of Weave 0.8, though it manifests slightly differently (with a generic error message) now.

I just upgraded one machine to Weave 1.0b1pre and did a sync on it.  Then when I tried to sync a different machine (still at Weave 0.8), I got an entry in Weave's notification area saying this:

  Error While Syncing
  Weave encountered an error while syncing:
  Unknown error. Weave will automatically retry
  this action.

(As in comment 0, the Activity Log still shows that Weave recognizes the server data as having a newer version -- this just needs to be propagated to the UI somehow.)

Comment 6

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/weave/rev/20d056779b70
Detect if sync failed because it's out of date and show a warning notification with a button to open the add-on manager's extension view.

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Verified fixed in Weave 1.0b2pre1.

(I'm running 1.0b2pre1 on one machine, and 1.0b2 on another machine.  The older "pre1" version fails to sync, now with the error-notification "You need to update Weave to continue syncing your data.")