Bug#790498: iceweasel: upgrading from jessie makes all passwords in the password manager invalid

[Török Edwin]

On 07/13/2015 01:46 AM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:28:02PM +0300, Török Edwin wrote:
>> Package: iceweasel
>> Version: 38.0.1-5
>> Severity: grave
>> Justification: causes non-serious data loss
>>
> 
> Your comment in upstream bug says that forcing a new upgrade of the
> signons store worked, so it's really not clear what went wrong the first
> time.

One possibility is that I upgraded from the Jessie version of firefox to the unstable one in the past to test something, which upgraded the password store to the new format at that time.
Then when I was done testing that site I downgraded back to the stable version in Jessie, and added/changed more passwords as usual, but that updated the passwords in the old store.

Now when I tried to upgrade again to the version in unstable it used the out-of-date signons store that it converted some time ago, and any changes made by the old firefox version haven't been taken into account.
That might explain why Firefox from unstable has seen less passwords than the Jessie version, and why none of them worked anymore (I changed them all using the old version of firefox).

If you think it'd be useful I can try to reproduce this with a fresh firefox profile and upgrading/downgrading while changing passwords.
Not sure what could be done to fix this, one way would to provide a button to import the passwords from the old store (even if it has been imported in the past already), and if their last changed time is newer than
the password in the new store use that, or just have both available and allow the user to choose and delete the outdated one.