Subject: bug#43487: icecat store names in user profiles break bundled addons

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 15:16:48 +0200

Hello Mark,

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 02:48:34AM -0400, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> To temporarily fix these problems while retaining most of your user
> data, one option is to press the "Refresh IceCat…" button in
> <about:support>.  Choosing this option will reset all your preferences
> and addons to the IceCat defaults, but allows you to preserve the rest
> of your data, including your bookmarks, browser history, cookies, saved
> passwords, and your open tabs.

thanks for this (very hidden) work-around. I confirm that it has worked
very well for me. And I would just like to mention a (not problematic)
caveat: "reset your addons" also includes removing additional add-ons
installed by the user.

> A proper fix will likely involve modifying the relevant code in IceCat
> to either avoid storing the full file names in extensions.json, or else
> to detect them on startup and automatically "refresh" them as needed.

So refreshing in the above sense should not be done without asking the
user first.

Andreas