Description of problem: Most desktop Linux sites use the centralized configuration capabilities in Firefox and other Mozilla projects. Autoconfiguration is broken in upstream Firefox 3 beta 5 and RHEL 5.2 beta but fixed in Firefox 3 trunk. The patch is trivial and included in the customer reference URL above. Or here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427927 Any chance this patch can get pulled in by Red Hat prior to RHEL 5.2 release next week? A lot of sites are going to scream if you don't. How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: Enable autoconfiguration for Firefox. If you really need our whole setup, let me know - this is a basic re-enablement issue from a bug. Actual results: No autoconfiguration. Expected results: Autocnfiguration works. Additional info: The impact to us is that we can't roll that verison of Firefox out - autoconfiguration is an important part of our Firefox setup. We'd either need to apply the patch ourselves and build our own packages or wait for Red Hat to get us something, both of which we've done before. FWIW, that impact is the same under RHEL 4.7 as well. If it's too late to get it in, we can take a hot fix or errata w/ debuginfo - I was hoping if I let you know quickly enough after we figured this out that you might be able to make the 5.2 and 4.7 releases right so that your support organization doesn't get hit by this issue. Any midsized or larger desktop Linux deployment is going to use Firefox autoconfiguration.
Unfortunately even with the final 3.0 version (firefox-3.0-2.el5) autoconfig is broken. Looks like there are some issues with the use of xulrunner. I needed to create a link /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/defaults/autoconfig -> /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/defaults/autoconfig/ to get autoconfig working. Firefox wrongly assumes some files in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/defaults/autoconfig which are in /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/defaults/autoconfig/ instead.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
Actually this got fixed quite some time ago, for example try running: rpm -qlv firefox | grep -i autoconfig on the current firefox-3.0.5-1.el5_2 version. You should see /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/defaults/autoconfig showing as a symlink to /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/defaults/autoconfig (modulo %{_libdir} differences etc...)
Alan, could you still reproduce it with updated firefox?
firefox has been rebased several times since this bug was filed and I haven't seen any recurrence of the problem. This bug should probably be closed.
See comment 10... IMHO it got fixed years ago. I suppose it might come back one day but...
Closing based on comment #10 and comment #15.