58881 - Ancient (suspicious) entries in the config files blocks features

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Masato]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.10 i686)
BuildID:    20001027

Entries from older versions of mozilla blocks features and cannot be removed
(execpt you edit the files manually)


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Just don't create a new profile for a longer time

Actual Results:  Several features are blocked. (In my case the history doesn't
work and
in Mail & Bookmarks were the colums which are swiched off (status, new ...) not
saved. )

The problem is:
It's lots of work if you configured several things (EMail accounts, 
newsgroups ...) and you need to make a new profile.
It's idiotic to check the files manually for such blockers.

Comment 1

[Luis Villa]

This is going to be a WONT FIX. The assumption is that if you are running
nightlies, you are willing to deal with this sort of thing. Stable releases will
install once and not change, but deleting .mozilla regularly is sort of a
standard procedure for doing QA.
Besides, this is a very difficult task- you are asking that mozilla either not
change the config file format (which blocks new functionality) or that someone
take the time to write scripts that will do this automatically. It isn't
impossible, but it would be difficult to write in the first place and
time-consuming to maintain. 

Comment 2

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

fraid this is so, letting asa decide though.

profile corruption is one of the pitfalls of a everchanging and bug-prone 

Comment 3

[Masato]

OK, but the problem is that this "bug" is not obviously. It sneaks in. Mostly 
features are blocked because they are not implememted yet or is still too buggy.
The user usually don't know when a specific feature works completly.

The easiest way to keep the profile clean (as soon as mozilla noticed that a new
build is running) may a "reverde profile creating":

1. read in all preferences
2. remove all entries that can be changed directly (Mail accounts, enable
javascript ....) or indirectly (which columns are switched of in the
mail-list-widget...)
3. remove all entries which genrated by the first start of components (browser,
mail client, bookmarks) AND have the value they should have in the current
build.

After this, the rest is the list of entries which are "suspicious" which can be
deleted.