firefox & thunderbird upgrade problem

[Gary Aitken]

Answering my own question in case it's relevant to anyone else.

The lynux article quoted below is useless; the missing library is
the result of the library search path not being set up correctly
because the startup script was bypassed when firefox was started
directly.  doh.

I managed to get both firefox and thunderbird working properly by
using the big stick:
   deinstall firefox
   deinstall thunderbird
   deinstall preferences-firefox
   mv .firefox and .thunderbird directories out of the way in both
   user and root accounts
   check installation directories (/usr/X11R6/...) for remnants of
   firefox and thunderbird and remove them.  In the process I found
   an old firefox install directory that shouldn't be causing problems,
   but also shouldn't have been there.
   pkgdb -F
   portupgrade -N -R www/firefox mail/thunderbird

After install, log in as root and run thunderbird and firefox.

I set up thunderbird from scratch, rather than moving my old profile
over, then moved the old mail files over (using a new name for any
duplicates, e.g. mv Inbox from old dir to Inbox_old in new dir).

It's not at all clear to me what the problem was, since I had
previously tried deinstall and reinstall with no luck.  The main
difference was removing both ports before reinstalling, removing
the old, unused firefox stuff, and doing pkgdb -F before the
portupgrade.   In any case, the above steps resurrected a sane world
where I could save preferences, <ctrl>T opened new tabs and loaded
the url in them, and all mail files were usable.

Gary Aitken wrote:
> I tried removing the directories, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc.
> All to no avail.  It's clearly looking at somethig else.
> 
> I also see the same problem Kirk Strauser is seeing with
> 
>     # firefox
>     *** nsExtensionManager::_disableObsoleteExtensions - failure, catching
> exception so finalize window can close
>     *** loading the extensions datasource
>     *** loading the extensions datasource
> 
> Although mine starts and runs, except I can't save anything and
> keyboard shortcuts and things like <ctrl>click don't behave
> properly (open the tab, but don't load the link)
> 
> I found a reference on a linux site about firefox-installer being
> the culprit (/usr/share/firefox-installer/firefox-bin) and a missing
> library, libmozjs.so.  Will check into it when I get a chance.
>   http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-July/msg03128.html
> 
>>> I upgraged thunderbird and firefox via portupgrade.
>>>
>>> Things kinda work ok, except I cannot modify preferences, and it
>>> doesn't see any of my old mail, which leads me to believe it
>>> doesn't like my .thunderbird and .mozilla directory hierarchy.
>>>
>>> All of the subdirectories and files in the .thunderbird tree are
>>> owned and writeable by the user, yet no modifications to the
>>> configuration (preferences) will write.  The same goes for
>>> firefox.
>>>
>>> Can someone give me a clue as to what is going on?  It behaves
>>> as if some directory is not writeable, but I sure can't find it.
> 
> 
>> Upgrading thunderbird and firefox involve instructions that are on the 
>> mozilla.org website. Certain directories in the .thunderbird/.mozilla 
>> directories need to be removed and regenerated by the new version of 
>> thunderbird/firefox.