576233 - Thunderbird 3.1 will not start if profile directory or extensions directory is a symbolic link

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 551152

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Thomas Bauer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1

Thunderbird 3.1 will only start once after upgrade from 3.0 and then never again, if the .thunderbird directory is a symbolic link and enigmail or lightning extensions are enabled. Happens also if only .thunderbird/.../extensions is a symbolic link.
Starting thunderbird with safe-mode still works.
Thunderbird 3.0 did not have this behaviour.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install TB 3.1 and enigmail or lightning
2. Start Thunderbird, works one time
3. Afterwards, Thunderbird never starts again
Actual Results:  
Not able to start TB 3.1 any more. Went back to TB 3.0. After replacing the symbolic links with the actual directories, TB 3.1 started as expected.

Expected Results:  
One solution would be to document that the profile directory must not be a symbolic link and to give a reasonable error message in case it is.
Better would be to allow like in TB 3.0 to have symlinks in the profile.

Perhaps it is related to the following firefox bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551152

Some other users suffer from this bug, see also the discussion in the enigmail forum:
http://www.mozilla-enigmail.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=713

Comment 1

[Patrick Brunschwig]

That's a "core" bug, not Thunderbird-specific.