On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 18:37:26 -0400, Max Hyre wrote: > Gentlefolk: > > I'm following unstable, using Synaptic pretty much daily > to reload the package files and perform all upgrades. > Firefox was recently upgraded (the last week or 10 days) to > 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.6-1, but I had an instance running from > before then until today. > > Today I tried to use https: protocol (buying online) and > was told, roughly, ``Can't do that---SSL isn't available''. > A couple of different sites acted the same. Finally > realizing an upgrade might have something to do with it, I > killed my instance and brought up another one. That one had > lost all my configuration, cookies, &c.
I would suspect that you had another crashed instance of firefox on your system or that the one you killed crashed during closing. If you start firefox again it thinks that the profile is already in use and it therefore creates a new (default) one. > Poking around showed ~/.mozilla/firefox had two > directories: <garbage1>.default/ and <garbage2>.default/; > the first had my setup. After some futzing around, I > renamed <garbage1> to <garbage2> and everything came up > fine. The second directory is the one created after firefox thought that the first profile was still in use. The "garbage" part is a random string which is generated when the profile is created. It is a security feature that can limit the damage of possible firefox bugs. These bugs might otherwise allow an attacker to read or even overwrite privileged information. The protection lies in the fact that the attacker cannot predict the name of the directory. > Eventually I figured that profiles.ini had the entry > ``Path=<garbage2>.default'', and I could probably have > edited that to have it DTRT. > > My question: What do I do from here? > o File a bug (there's currently none for this > situation)? > o Realize this is one of the costs of rapid updates, and > restart all apps after every upgrade (a pain)? If so, > must I reboot as well (more pain)? > o Chalk it up to the phase of the moon and ignore it? > > In my latest update (minutes ago), I notice changes to > such interesting packages as thunderbird, xbase-clients and > libpam, suggesting, respectively, restarting thunderbird, > logging out and back in to my desktop, and rebooting. You only have to reboot if you install a new kernel. All the programs which run in the background (daemons, services) are automatically stopped before they are upgraded and restarted after the upgrade is complete. The update scripts will of course not just kill or restart user applications. Therefore you have to do this yourself. It is probably not always necessary to do so, but it is difficult to know this unless you analyze each program. Problems can arise if some libraries or other routines are still in memory in the old versions and these are for some reason incompatible with the new versions on the hard disk. I think this is the most likely explanation for your firefox crash and the subsequent problems with the new profile. I always close all my applications before I upgrade. If there are updates to a significant number of X packages I also log out and restart X after the upgrade. That seems to be enough to avoid the sort of problem you had. -- Regards, Florian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]