Bug #11842: DAVE proposes to "Retry" in a loop when download fails because of file system permissions

Bug #11842

DAVE proposes to "Retry" in a loop when download fails because of file system permissions

Added by sajolida 2016-09-25 11:09:44 . Updated 2017-12-16 07:37:06 .

Status:

Rejected

Priority:

Normal

Assignee:

Category:

Installation

Target version:

Start date:

2016-09-25

Due date:

% Done:

Feature Branch:

Type of work:

Website

Blueprint:

Starter:

Affected tool:

Deliverable for:

Description

Visit https://tails.boum.org/install/download in Tails.
Install DAVE.
Start the download and try to save it to /usr/local/lib/tor-browser.
DAVE proposed to Retry.
Clicking “Retry” goes in a loop.

It should instead propose to “Download again”.

A workaround would be to also display “Cancel” in this state.

Subtasks

History

#1 Updated by sajolida 2016-09-25 11:10:12

blocks #8538 added

#2 Updated by sajolida 2016-09-25 11:11:49

Assignee set to tchou

tchou: can you have a look whether this can be fixed by CSS only or whether we need Giorgio to fix that.

I marked it as blocking Hivos because I think it’s a serious bug for people who end up in such a situation: there’s no way out, and I think that the workaround I’m proposing in the description of this ticket is easy to do. But if you disagree, let’s talk about it!

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2016-09-25 11:53:55

It feels like a bug (in Firefox? in DAVE?) to allow the user to download to a directory where they are not allowed to write.

#4 Updated by sajolida 2016-09-25 15:13:33

> It feels like a bug (in Firefox? in DAVE?) to allow the user to download to a directory where they are not allowed to write.

Yes. Though I think that there are two different bugs:

- The browser proposing to download to a read-only directory.
- DAVE proposing to “Retry” instead of “Download again”.

#5 Updated by tchou 2016-10-31 06:32:31

Assignee changed from tchou to sajolida

I’m ok with the workaround, but anyway we shoud prevent the user to be in this situation.
So let’s go on with ma1 to fix it ?

#6 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-01 13:40:40

Assignee changed from sajolida to ma1
QA Check set to Info Needed

Giorgio: could we catch this earlier and prevent DAVE to pretend it will download to a location where it is not allowed to write?

#7 Updated by ma1 2016-11-03 12:35:14

Assignee changed from ma1 to sajolida

It is quite messy, because it depenends on the platform: for instance on Windows it gets done by Firefox itself, which automatically propososes to change the download path to user’s home directory or cancel the download, but prevents from trying violating the permissions anyway. If we implement our own checks (how? trying to write a file, catching the exception and showing a message?) we may end we duplicates on some platforms and we need to maintain extra UI clutter.

Another case would be the directory becoming non writable “in process” because the space gets exhausted: should we try to preallocate gigabytes in advance?

IMHO the best fix is what you call a work-around, i.e. providing the CANCEL button together with the RETRY one: this way the user has also the option of, for instance, removing some read-only conditions, for instance by flipping a switch on a removable disk, by deleting some useless big files or by changing wrong permissions.

#8 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-03 16:42:08

Assignee changed from sajolida to tchou

Thanks Giorgio for the analysis and I agree with you it’s not worth trying to prevent this from happening.

So, tchou, can you check if we can display “Download again” instead of “Retry” in this state already? And otherwise ask Giorgio to adapt DAVE to allow this?

On top of displaying “Download again” we should use a different error message because right now it tells people to “check your network connection and click Retry” which won’t help here. I’ll do that.

#9 Updated by Anonymous 2017-06-29 12:02:10

No news on this ticket since 8 months. I think we need to see this done by the person responsible for DAVE, especially since this might also be related to how DAVE handles mirrors. Reassigning to sajolida as I don’t currently know who is working on DAVE.