[CentOS] [OT] Firefox loses plugins, anyone else? Bug? Known?

[William L. Maltby]

On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 10:16 -0500, William L. Maltby wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 15:48 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
<snip need m ore copy portion>

> > 
> > Strange. I am a bug triager of (among others) all gecko-related 
> > bugs in the RH bugzilla, and I cannot recall to hear about a bug 
> > like this.
> > 
> > Isn't there something strange about your set-up ($HOME on NFS, 
> > SELinux issue, ...)?
> 
> No NFS active. SELinux would affect all users/apps as far as I can see.
> No messages in secure or messages related to anything that looks
> appropriate.
> 
> The "something strange about your set-up" was one of my thoughts. AFAIK,
> it's a "box stock" setup now. However, in the past, I had beta versions
> of the 3.0.x installed locally. There was some local manual manipulation
> involved in that. I'll be checking against another login that does not
> have that history, as a starting point. Subsequent steps will be based
> on the results of that, e.g. compare directories, permissions, etc. I
> strongly suspect I'll find something there.

Matěj et al,

I was able to _start_ a comparison process, not completed yet. Details
follow. But first, one more piece of background. In  response to the
previous thread I mentioned, I had saved a copy of the pluginreg.dat as
pluginreg.dat-. Did some manual edits, finished trying to help that
previous issue and copied the pluginreg.dat- back to pluginreg.dat. All
seemed normal at that time, though I can't recall firing up FF by
clicking a link from T'bird.

Now, I logged in as a user that had never had the beta version installed
and had no prior manual manipulation.

- Made sure that all instances of FF were closed on the system for all
  users (me, myself and I)
- Started T'bird, opened the pertinent mail, clicked the same link
- Did cp -a of the pluginreg.dat to pluginreg.dat- (this "duplicates"
  the structure that exists in the original offending instance). At that
  version all my stuff seems normal.
- Unfortunately, 22 language packs were available. I disabled all those
  and restarted (btw, when that is done the previous saved tabs are
  lost - no prompt for "Save ..." is issued - another issue I guess).
- Upon restart, there were differences between the pluginreg.dat and
  pluginreg.dat-.
- I repeated the "click on link, cp -a, quit" several times, saving
  several instances of the pluginreg.dat as -2, -3, ...

Net result is that all plugins but Shockwave Flash disappeared (most
other things were still there through -2 version, although a detailed
examination will be needed to confirm this) and the _obvious_ and
_quickly_ seen changes through version -2 were a re-ordering of the
entries and a change to an (apparent) sequence or version number of some
kind. After that all disappeared but shockwave.

Doing a "less" on the new pluginreg.dat revealed nothing other than most
plugins were gone (mplayer, helix, adobe reader) and many application
bindings disappeared.

I also did an "od -c" to see if some hinky DOS formatting crept in. I
didn't find any \r\n sequences though, just the normal \n.

I've the saved versions of the pluginreg.dat.

Next-to-last time in FF, I went to tools->add-ons and the plugins tab
was empty. I quit and did the "click link" thing again, which started FF
again. This time the plugins tab shows Shockwave Flash only is
available.

If this is too OT for the list, feel free to mail directly. I'm willing
to help any way I can. Further, if there is something else you would
like me to try, please just say so.

Thanks for your interest, time and assistance.

-- 
Bill