599572 - Add some kind of smart corruption check/repair capability to Addons Manager

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Dave Garrett]

(Dave Garrett in bug 597868 comment #11)
> The other fallback possibility would be to catch any errors on loading
> everything for about:addons and rebuild anything as needed there, rather than
> on startup. Would be nice if loading about:addons could auto-fix some
> corruption problems automatically. Worth filing a bug for this?

(Dave Townsend in bug 597868 comment #12)
> It's actually difficult for the frontend UI to figure out there is a problem
> going on. It might be worth having a bug on file to figure out some way to do
> something with this though.

Corruption happens. Sometimes it's a bug like bug 597868, sometimes an extension does something really stupid (ex: bug 590608, though N/A to current situation), sometimes some external software does something stupid to the profile, or sometimes the filesystem or hardware just plain fails.

Doing checks on startup would slow things down, but when about:addons is being loaded it already has to load up details for all installed addons. The idea is that if it catches any errors when doing this it would trigger some form of automatic corruption check/repair capability.

Example of an error that could be an indication of a problem: in bug 597868 comment 0 STR 10 the Error Console had complaints about "No chrome package registered" for the logo image. Seeing as it should either be loading the icon from a loaded chrome package or the default icon, this implies something is borked.

A full corruption check/repair could also be attempted on startup loading into safe mode.

Best case scenario on finding an error is that it corrects the problem precisely. Worst case scenario is that it finds a detectable problem, but fails to fix it, in which case deleting and rebuilding the extensions.* files in the profile directory would be a last resort that would fry a little config but at least get things working again.

I'm not sure how much would be worth attempting here, but it would be nice if the Addon Manager could automagically detect and fix problems when it gets errors loading things. Of course errors could be the addon's fault sometimes too, but any checking would have to be smart enough to not get tripped up by that.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.