838102 - activities are saved in the manifest with a modified href after an update

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: DOM: Apps, defect)

Description

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

STR:
* install app at http://everlong.org/mozilla/activities/
* go to Settings > Device Information and check for an update
=> the app will automatically update since it is an hosted app without an appcache
=> the activities href are made absolute
* before Bug 834618 is fixed, a reboot would brick the phone. I believe this is what indeed caused Bug 834618.
* with Bug 834618 fixed, the activities are wrong and therefore are skipped and not used.

To check this is wrong, just check the manifest.webapp file for this app on the phone.

I believe this is a very serious bug as this basically breaks activities at update, so nom tef?.

Comment 1

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

FYI the app will always update as I use the current time as the version property in the manifest.

Comment 2

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

I installed and updated you app while having debug logs, and each time I got:

I/Gecko   (16088): -*-*- Webapps.jsm : _createActivitiesToRegister: http://everlong.org/mozilla/activities/manifest.webapp, activity share, description.href is http://everlong.org/share.html

Which looks right.

Comment 3

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

The logs are ok when you install/update it, but the saved manifest is wrong (as I said in comment 0).

You only see this in the logs when you reboot (because we never reload the saved manifest during runtime).

Comment 4

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

There was no reboot in your STR...

Comment 5

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

Because this is not necessary to see that the saved manifest.webapp is wrong !

And BTW I _did_ mention a reboot for the "Bug 834618 not fixed" case, maybe this was not clear enough for the "Bug 834618 is fixed" case, sorry for that.

Comment 6

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

I didn't want to insist on the reboot because I wanted to make it clear that it was wrong after an update, not after a reboot, even if a reboot makes it apparent.

Well now you know this.

Comment 7

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

Attachment: patch

Comment 8

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

Comment on attachment 710461 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

r=me
fixes the bug for me, thanks

Comment 9

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

(In reply to Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] from comment #0)
> I believe this is a very serious bug as this basically breaks activities at
> update, so nom tef?.

Can you better explain the user impact and possible user workarounds?

Comment 10

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

Well.

Say an app has an activity. This app updates. The user reboots. The activity is now invalid and is ignored.

The only way to restore it is to uninstall/reinstall the app. But the user doesn't know this as for him nothing appears to be broken.

The patch is basically a one liner (the other changes are only to use a var instead of an object property). The error here was that we were updating the activity with its absolute url, but absolute url are invalid for an activity. Instead we're not updating the activity anymore but rather store the absolute url to be used in a local variable.

So I believe this patch is very safe.

Comment 11

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

The impact as Julien says is basically dataloss on the web activity itself, which will impact apps that make use of web activities on marketplace that need to be updated.

And I do confirm the fact that we have apps like this on marketplace.

Comment 12

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

I don't want to insist too much. Still, this is imho a fundamental feature in the FFOS experience.

Comment 13

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

This absolutely needs to be uplifted.

Comment 14

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/b9df99fb47ba

Comment 15

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/b9df99fb47ba

Comment 16

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-b2g18/rev/d4a4e6818582
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-b2g18_v1_0_0/rev/21eac04e8eca

Comment 17

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Testing with Fabrice's patch on the other packaged app web activities bug he's about to land shows this working fine. Marking as verified.