392291 - add a preference to disable places in xulrunner

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Sergey Yanovich]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070723 Iceweasel/2.0.0.6 (Debian-2.0.0.6-1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla-1.9 trunk

Platform Enhancement

Although places are a firefox component, they must be present in xulrunner if the latter needs to run the former. However, not all XUL applications require places to function. For such applications places are causing unwanted delays at startup and shutdown.

Adding a preference to disable places on a per application level would improve quality of mozilla as a platform.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run a no-op xulrunner applications
2. Close it
Actual Results:  
places.sqlite is created unconditionally at startup
places.sqlite is updated unconditionally during shutdown

Expected Results:  
places.sqlite creation and update may be disabled

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

actually, i'm not sure which part of xulrunner could start Places, places.sqlite should be created only if something uses a Places service, and in such a case i'd suppose it is needed.

on 1.9.1 Places could be started by the DBFlush service, while on current Minefield that should not happen anymore (bug 483980). there are plans to push that patch into 1.9.1.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

It's possible to build a custom xulrunner undefining MOZ_PLACES, that is the best solution if one wants to avoid any additional load.
That said, we are quite light on startup/shutdown nowadays.