#6183 HIGH Never A: Browser vanishes from activity toolbar for no apparent reason

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#6183: Browser vanishes from activity toolbar for no apparent reason
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 Reporter:  Ivo     |       Owner:  marco         
     Type:  defect  |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  high    |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  sugar   |     Version:  Q2D07         
 Keywords:          |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:          |   Blockedby:                
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 I have spent a while trying to track why this happened, but haven't
 reached a conclusion yet.  My best bet is that something in my profile may
 be corrupt.  I haven't been able to trigger this through emulation, so I'm
 left in the dark.

 Heres what happened:
 Using firmware Q2D07 and a B4 machine, I upgraded to Build 653.  A few
 days later I notice the Browser is gone.  Just like that.  At first I even
 suspected it had been removed by the upgrade, but then I recalled I had
 made some tests with the Browser shortly after the upgrade.  Of those I
 managed to talk in IRC, no one had ever seen this behavior.

 The Browser icon is gone from the toolbar.  It was there.  It used to work
 for a shortly while.  Now it's gone just like that.  Previous activities
 involving the Browser are still listed in Journal, but when I try to click
 on them they bring up things like Etoys and AbiWord instead of the
 Browser.  As far as Sugar knows, it's dead.

 In my quest to find out what happened, I upgraded to a (god-forbid)
 joyride build, i.e. 1540.  The Browser came back.  It worked as brand new.
 Then I rebooted.  It was still there.  I rebooted a second time and poof,
 it was gone.

 The only explanation I managed to come up with was an event that happened
 during the upgrade from build 635 to 653.  I noticed the space in the disk
 was almost gone.  I had like 10% free space, somewhat less.  And the
 upgrade was failing because when attempting to backup my home folder, my
 USB key did not have enough space for all that.  I found the problem:
 somewhere deep inside home, in one of the Sugar folders, every multimedia
 file I had tested[1] -- video, music, whatever -- had been stored there
 with some random name.  This situation itself should be reported as a bug;
 I mean, the system is holding up permanently every single file even those
 tested locally through file:// under some random obscure profile folder
 without any option to remove it.  I cannot believe the developers expect
 children to know why their disk is completely filled up after watching
 three educational videos.  In my opinion, the system should either
 erradicate the files at shutdown or at the very least provide a delete
 option in Journal.

 So, anyway, after noticing this, I deleted the subfolders containing the
 useless files and everything seemed fine.  My guess why the Browser
 vanished some time after the two following upgrades is that Sugar is
 trying to read something that isn't there anymore and simply corrupts
 something that makes it impossible to launch Browser until the next
 upgrade fixes whatever that is.  Which in turn is corrupted again shortly
 after said upgrade.

 I will be posting on the dev mailing list, because we need to track this
 problem down.  We need to find out if it happens to more people as well.

 By the way, I do not see anything relevant with this issue in the logs, so
 that is why I'm not attaching any.

 [1] For those who don't know me, I'm from Xiph, so yeah I had to test an
 amount of multimedia files.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6183>
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