Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 104131
mozilla erased my bookmarks file when run as root
Last modified: 2008-08-02 19:40:34 EDT
Run mozilla as yourself. Create a bookmark. Exit. Run "su -m root -c /bin/bash". Run mozilla. Exit. Exit from the shell. Run mozilla as yourself again. Try to use your bookmarks; note that they are empty. I *think* that's sufficient; you may actually need to view the bookmarks menu when running as root to make mozilla blow them away, but I'm not certain about that. I'm using mozilla-1.4-12. This is a bad bug, since it results in data loss.
-m fails to reset the environment. I'll bet you're writing out the bookmarks file as root and then the user can't read it.
I know what -m does. You'd lose that bet. I checked after running mozilla as root and the bookmarks file was *gone*, not just unreadable. Besides, even if you were right, that's still a bug -- if Mozilla can't read the bookmarks file, it should complain, not silently delete the unreadable file.
'Red Hat Raw Hide' refers to the development tree for Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Linux is no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. If you are still running Red Hat Linux, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Red Hat apologizes that these issues were not resolved in a more timely manner. However, we do want to make sure that important don't slip through the cracks. If these issues are still present in a current release, such as Fedora Core 5, please move these bugs to that product and version. Note that any remaining Red Hat Raw Hide bugs will be closed as 'CANTFIX' on September 30, 2006. Thanks again for your help.
Still a problem in mozilla-1.7.12-5 (i.e., fc5).
Fedora Core 5 is no longer supported, could you please reproduce this with the updated version of the currently supported distribution (Fedora Core 6, or Fedora 7, or Rawhide)? If this issue turns out to still be reproducible, please let us know in this bug report. If after a month's time we have not heard back from you, we will have to close this bug as CANTFIX. Setting status to NEEDINFO, and awaiting information from the reporter. Thanks in advance.
Still a bug in firefox-2.0.0.4-3.fc8. <frustrated> Amazing that it hasn't been fixed in almost four years. Perhaps you could consider upstreaming it rather than just letting it stagnate here and making me reverify it every so often? Or at least tell me definitively that you're not going to fix it, and I'll report it into the firefox bug-tracking system myself? </frustrated>
I am really sorry, and yes you are right, we should upstreamed this couple of years ago :-(. However, upstream situation is not good -- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205053 good closed as WONTFIX (I can hardly believe this myself, but it did) and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251456 is already three years old (yes, slightly younger, than this one ;-)) and it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Firefox bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251692 and three years old as well. Nevertheless, I am afraid that I have to upstream this bug already. Whole this situation is messy, but it should be probably really resolved upstream. We don't have time and resources to keep fork of mozilla.