Improve handling of switching dat file versions

[mrose17]

• Did you search for similar issues before submitting this one? yes

• Describe the issue you encountered: go to a site from the about:preference# payments page

• Platform (Win7, 8, 10? macOS? Linux distro?): macOS

• Brave Version (revision SHA): 6638b91

• Steps to reproduce:

  1. run npm run watch & npm start
  2. go to about:preferences#payments
  3. click on site, e.g., coindesk.com
  4. BOOM

• Actual result: crash

• Expected result: new tab with website

• Will the steps above reproduce in a fresh profile? If not what other info can be added?

• Is this an issue in the currently released version? it's in master & dev-channel

• Can this issue be consistently reproduced? yes

• Extra QA steps: none

• Screenshot if needed:
  

• Any related issues: none

[bbondy]

@mrose17 try clearing your .dat files. I think this is a symptom of switching between dev-channel and master frequently. Let's leave this open though so I can improve that use case. Basically though your session stores the downloaded adblock version and then it's not actually that version.

[mrose17]

deleting the .dat files didn't help. i also removed the entire brave-development/ directory, started the browser, quit the browser, and put my ledger files back, and got a crash... wow!

[NejcZdovc]

@mrose17 I had the same problem in #8486. What I did:

npm clean cache
rm -rf ~/.node-gyp
rm -rf ~/.electron
rm -rf node_modules

Cleared brave-development, git pull and then npm i.

Now it's working

[mrose17]

what?!? i don't have to reinstall either node or the OS?... (-;

the only step i was missing was the npm cache clean and getting rid of .node-gyp ... thanks!

[bbondy]

actually I just thought of the reason I think you guys got this.

i) install node_modules on master you get ad-block library which expects data files in format v3.
ii) switch to dev-channel, but don't re-install node-modules. You have front end that looks for data format v2.

The opposite can happen too if you got he other way.

The way to fix this is to have the library specify the dat file version instead of having it separately defined in front end code.

[mrose17]

that makes sense. in this case, the culprit was .node_gyp which cached the ad-block library (i delete node_modules/ often...)

[bbondy]

brave-experiments/ad-block@85e6b35