824210 - B2G Desktop causes assertion ABORT: CRT ASSERT [...] strftime.c(798) : Assertion failed: ( "Invalid format directive" , 0 )

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect, P4)

Description

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

This is caused by Gaia's use of the "%e" format directive for formatting dates, which Windows' strftime does not support. Apparently the workaround is to use "%#d" instead but there are parts of Gaia that parse format strings and they fail to handle "%#d" correctly.

Comment 1

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

NOTE: This makes it impossible (AFAICT) to use Windowes debug builds of B2G desktop. Even if you set XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK=warn, this assertion still kills your process because it is a assertion from the CRT, not a Gecko or NSPR assertion.

Comment 2

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

See also bug 794662.

Comment 3

[Brian Smith (:briansmith, :bsmith, use NEEDINFO?)]

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/7154

I am gone for 10 days and I'm not sure how pull requests and code reviews work together so please land this patch if it makes sense at all. I verified that it seems to make B2G desktop on Windows work.

Comment 4

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

That would be an acceptable workaround but %d and %e are not strictly equivalent.
Lemme try to find a better fix.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Note that %e is just not part of the JS language. It happens to work in Firefox because we currently forward to strftime, but I'm pretty sure no other browser supports it and we should stop using it long-term for that reason.

I don't know whether that's acceptable short-term, though ;-)

Comment 6

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #5)
> Note that %e is just not part of the JS language. It happens to work in
> Firefox because we currently forward to strftime, but I'm pretty sure no
> other browser supports it and we should stop using it long-term for that
> reason.

I still prefer to rely on strftime-like mnemonics in shared/js/l10n_date.js because it’s an easy way to format a date. At the moment we rely on the Gecko-specific `.toLocaleFormat()' method, but we could implement the whole strftime parser in JS if we really wanted to be cross-browser.

In the long term, it’d be nice to have a similar way to format dates in vanilla JavaScript. If I understood correctly, ES6 will bring us most of the solution.

Comment 7

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

Attachment: patch proposal

Comment 8

[Joe Cheng [:jcheng] (please needinfo)]

Triage: base on comment 1, it seems to be only a problem for B2G desktop. BB-, tracking-b2g18+. Please renom if this is really blocking developers

Comment 9

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

Comment on attachment 695237 [details] [diff] [review]
patch proposal

NOTE: If blocking-basecamp+ is set, just land it for now.

[Approval Request Comment]
Bug caused by (feature/regressing bug #): ?
User impact if declined: can't build b2g-desktop on windows
Testing completed: manual
Risk to taking this patch (and alternatives if risky): very low

Comment 10

[Fabien Cazenave [:kaze]]

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/commit/9ad3ad808df71abf70976b57447d8148ce3b38ba

Comment 11

[Jeni]

verified it on Unagi build 201301140703222