Does firefox upgrades need some pre/post install love to close and restart firefox during upgrades

[Bill McGonigle]

On 11/18/2009 12:51 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> I don't understand why everyone's tip-toeing around Firefox's
> brokenness, here. Other applications don't seem to have problems with
> in-place updates. Why isn't anyone filing bugs on Firefox upstream?

Aren't we deleting the old firefox on upgrade?
  /usr/lib64/firefox-3.5.5/
is what I have now.

/usr/lib64/firefox-3.5.4/ is gone.  Is it reasonable to delete an
application and expect it to continue to run properly?  I think all
Firefox could do to prevent this would be to open() all the files it
might need so that when the filesystem marks them as deleted they'll
still be usable until closed.  But that means >450 open filehandles with
the current version.

Maybe the problem is that we're deleting the files out from under a
running application.  Or our directory naming conventions are wrong.  Or
our filesystems lack semantics to handle this elegantly.  Maybe updates
should be more event driven.

The general class of problem for the app seems reasonable and creating
an O(n) solution instead of an O(1) solution seems like the wrong
approach.  I suspect a bug filed on BMO "continue to work properly after
Firefox is deleted" will get WONTFIX'ed or NOTABUG'ed pretty quickly.

-Bill

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