TB 9.x partial update: unable to remove directory: tobedeleted

On October 02, 2019 an anonymous blog commenter reported something that appears to be an update problem. From https://blog.torproject.org/comment/284256#comment-284256:

Anonymous (not verified) said:
partial update is not clean; logs:
NS_main: unable to remove directory: tobedeleted, err: 41

boklm said:
Where/when do you have this error?

Anonymous (not verified) said:
Win 10 x64

added TorBrowserTeam202002 actualpoints::0.25 component::applications/tor browser owner::brade points::1.0 priority::medium resolution::not a bug severity::normal status::closed tbb-9.0 tbb-update type::defect labels

brade and I will need to double-check, but if I remember correctly the updater log message about not being able to remove the tobedeleted directory is nothing to worry about. That directory will be removed later (when the browser is restarted).

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, tbb-9.0 added

Moving tickets to November 2019

Trac:
Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201910 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201911 added

Assigning tickets to brade and mcs

Trac:
Status: new to assigned
Owner: tbb-team to brade

Trac:
Cc: N/A to tbb-team

Moving tickets to December

Trac:
Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201911 deleted, TorBrowserTeam201912 added

Trac:
Keywords: TorBrowserTeam201912 deleted, TorBrowserTeam202001 added

Moving tickets to February

Trac:
Keywords: TorBrowserTeam202001 deleted, TorBrowserTeam202002 added

Unless the original blog commenter experienced a failed incremental update, this is not a bug. My guess is that they saw a line in their update log file that appeared to be an error and wanted to let us know about it.

Kathy and I confirmed that the log message occurs in the normal course of things. What happens is that, on Windows, updater.exe cannot delete the DLLs that it depends on. The files are renamed and moved to a temporary directory named tobedeleted. In Firefox, MoveFileEx() is used to tell the OS remove that directory upon next reboot. Since that mechanism will write to the Windows Registry (which we want to avoid), our Tor Browser patches for #4234 (moved) add an #ifdef to omit the block of code that uses MoveFileEx(), here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser.git/tree/toolkit/mozapps/update/updater/updater.cpp?h=tor-browser-68.3.0esr-9.5-1-build1#n4007

To make sure tobedeleted and its contents are eventually removed in Tor Browser, we added code to do so during browser start up, here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser.git/tree/toolkit/xre/nsUpdateDriver.cpp?h=tor-browser-68.3.0esr-9.5-1-build1#n879

Trac:
Status: assigned to closed
Resolution: N/A to not a bug

Trac:
Actualpoints: N/A to 0.25

Your hack seems to be a little bit dirty ;) But it is a good item for upstreaming to make updater.exe portable again :)

closed

changed time estimate to 8h

added 2h of time spent

moved to tpo/applications/tor-browser#31984 (closed)