655143 - Firefox 3.6.17 or 3.5.19 Major Updates to 4.0.1 with incompatible extensions are immediately failing extension search

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, defect)

Description

[Al Billings [:abillings - ex-MoCo]]

Attachment: Failure Dialog

If a user is running Firefox 3.5.19 or 3.6.17 with extensions incompatible with Firefox 4.0.1, they are warned that they are running incompatible extensions. On Firefox 4.0.1 first run, the "Firefox Update" dialog will tell them again and the user can check for updates to the extensions. 

When this happens, the dialog, for a half-second, has the "checking..." dialog saying it may take a few minutes and then IMMEDIATELY returns the error dialog stating, "Some problems were encountered when trying to find updates".

This looks to be a server side issue and can be seen on all operating systems (I checked Windows XP, Ubuntu 10.04, and OS X 10.6).

Steps to Reproduce
1. Install Firefox 3.6.17
2. Install Live HTTP Headers (which is not 4.0.1 compatible) in a clean profile
3. Launch with the profile from step 2 after restart
4. Check for Updates and go through update process
5. On first run for Firefox 4.0.1, tell it to check for updates when warning of incompatible extensions

Comment 1

[krupa raj[:krupa]]

Here is Stephen's screencast:

http://screencast.com/t/41h0hcH7MxH

Comment 2

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Here's the URL that's failing to yields results in its XML output:

https://versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org/update/VersionCheck.php?reqVersion=2&id={8f8fe09b-0bd3-4470-bc1b-8cad42b8203a}&version=0.16&maxAppVersion=3.6.*&status=userEnabled,incompatible&appID={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}&appVersion=4.0.1&appOS=WINNT&appABI=x86-msvc&locale=en-US&currentAppVersion=4.0.1&updateType=99

Comment 3

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Here's the URL that's failing to yields results in its XML output:
> 
> https://versioncheck.addons.mozilla.org/update/VersionCheck.php?reqVersion=2&id={8f8fe09b-0bd3-4470-bc1b-8cad42b8203a}&version=0.16&maxAppVersion=3.6.*&status=userEnabled,incompatible&appID={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}&appVersion=4.0.1&appOS=WINNT&appABI=x86-msvc&locale=en-US&currentAppVersion=4.0.1&updateType=99

...which makes the Add-ons Manager throw:

Warning: WARN addons.updates: Error: Missing updates property for urn:mozilla:extension:{8f8fe09b-0bd3-4470-bc1b-8cad42b8203a}
Source File: resource://gre/modules/AddonUpdateChecker.jsm
Line: 472

to the Error Console.

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Ok, this is caused by an inadvertent change that I made to update checks in Firefox 4. The update.rdf generally looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<RDF:RDF xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">

  <RDF:Description about="urn:mozilla:extension:[e-mail]">
    <em:updates>
      <RDF:Seq>
        <!-- updates in here -->
      </RDF:Seq>
    </em:updates>
  </RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF>

In Firefox 3.6 if the <em:updates> property didn't exist (i.e. if it was basically a blank RDF document) then it was fine, it just meant no updates were available and a warning in the console. In Firefox 4 this changed to being a failure to check for updates.

We can trivially patch this in Firefox, but if you want to fix it quicker then presumably AMO's update check script could also be patched to output the extra bits of info so the add-ons manager doesn't complain.

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

What would the AMO change look like? no data in RDF:Seq block? Can the Seq block be missing?

Comment 6

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

We should probably fix this in Firefox 5, nominating. If this becomes a "fix the server" bug we'll need a separate "fix the client" bug.

Comment 7

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> What would the AMO change look like? no data in RDF:Seq block? Can the Seq
> block be missing?

The RDF:Seq block would have to be present (if the em:updates property isn't a container then we throw an error), but it can be empty.

Comment 8

[Andy McKay]

Should a completely invalid ID, still return?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<RDF:RDF xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">
</RDF:RDF>

Comment 9

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Should a completely invalid ID, still return?
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> 
> <RDF:RDF xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
>          xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">
> </RDF:RDF>

It's a valid response and Firefox should take it to mean that AMO doesn't have any updates available for that invalid ID.

Comment 10

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Filed bug 655162 for the client fix. Leaving this in case you want to consider a server fix

Comment 11

[Robert Kaiser]

Well, I don't think we want to do yet another updater for Firefox 4 just for this, so I'd guess we'll need a server fix so update to FF4 works fine.

Comment 12

[Andy McKay]

https://github.com/jbalogh/zamboni/commit/ab673c1220f86bbd452c7e877c4cee1a71897bef

In preview: http://bit.ly/iIYf27 vs http://bit.ly/lWH7nc