111940 - Profile Manager appends username to path.

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Bassford]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.6+)
Gecko/20011125
BuildID:    20011125

Despite manually specifying a custom path for the location of profile data, the
profile manager insists on appending the username to the end of whatever path
you give it.  This makes it impossible to make your profile data path be "c:\My
Documents and Settings\Username\Mozilla".

It is redundant, unaesthetic, and rather insulting for Mozilla to ignore your
express wish and force the above example to be "c:\My Documents and
Settings\Username\Mozilla\Username".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create a new profile.
2.Override the default path and use a custom one.

Actual Results:  The profile manager appends the profile username to the
explicit path you just provided.

Expected Results:  The profile manager should not change the explicit path you
provided in any way at all.  Salting aside (addressed in bug 70931), half of my
complaint against that being exactly the same as my problem with this, the
profile manager should not append the profile username or alter the custom path
you provided.

Comment 1

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

When you specify a profile directory, that is the directory in which the
profile, which *is* a directory, is created - not the directory which will hold
the profile files. If the change you propose was made and the user picked C:\
for the profile directory, files would be spewed out all over the root of their
hard drive. Obviously, this is not what should happen by default. Also, if they
wanted to have more than one profile dir in the same place, they would need to
create the root directory manually for each profile. There could be a control in
the UI for this, but I bet it would confuse more people than it would help. 

Comment 2

[Jason Bassford]

Most people will just accept the default.  Anybody who cares enough (and is
computer knowledgeable enough) to specify a different directory should know
better than to pick c:\.  Any number of other applications out there on the
market and in the wild allow you to pick an install directory, and many of them
put files directly into the root of that directy.  You can specify c:\ with them
too - if you want to or are not intelligent enough to pick something else.

The "Data directory" should be the root level directory that contains subfolders
and data files.  A series of single-folder subfolders (1\2\3\4) is hardly
useful, if the only thing each one contains is another single-folder subfolder.
 (In this case, at present, a folder named "Username" and another one named
"12345.slt").

This bug report is a complaint about the lack of choice that the application
gives to the user who knows what they are doing and what they want to have
happen.  If, in satisfactorily addressing the bug, it's decided that safeguards
should be put in place to prevent somebody using c:\ as their root folder,
that's fine.  (Although, I would also complain if I really DID want, for
whatever reason, to put my files directly into c:\ (not that I can think of a
case when I would) and the program refused to do so.)

In terms of creating the "root directory manually for each profile" - there is
no need to do so at all if they just accept the defaults.  This is just a straw
man argument.  The default selection intelligently segregates directories by
using "username", and it works just fine to prevent the situation you desribe. 
Only someone who manually overrides the default selection for more than one
profile would have to worry about putting the profile data root into different
places for each.

The bottom line is that this bug report is about choice for those people who
care enough about it - and I abhor the fact that Mozilla prevents me from
choosing where I want my profile data directory to be.  Salting directories also
takes choice away - but, thankfully, that's now being addressed.

If you agreed to re-open the override of salting directories, how is this any
different?  Why allow anybody to change profile directories in the first place
AT ALL?  Obviously there is support for specifying a directory different than
the default.  So why only support it half way?

Comment 3

[timeless]

Ok, then i propose we put back salting. Mozilla shouldn't be seen as wavering.
</strawman>

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

No, since salting produces a random directory name rather than a fixed one.

But, to follow the example, if you put back salting then you should ALSO
completely remove the ability to change the default profile directory.

Bottom line as I see it: You should either never have the ability to override
the default directory - OR you should have the ability to override and specify
the directory and NOT have it get changed by the program in any way.

It should be one extreme or the other.  Anything in the middle is confusing. 
You shouldn't be offered the opportunity to change the directory to something
you want - only to have it taken away again when it changes it to something only
based on what you enter.

Comment 5

[K'Trina Medina]

Verified

Comment 6

[Olivier Cahagne]

*** Bug 181246 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Aaron Lawrence]

OK, this is dumb. I also object to this because I want to put my Mozilla profile in a folder called

c:\work\net

But that means I have to call the profile Net, to get the path I want. Very useful indeed.