1128692 - (user_directories) Mozilla products doesn't allow to use a custom user configuration directory

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 259356

(Core :: XPCOM, defect)

Description

[psychoslave]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141113113219

Steps to reproduce:

  # configure a Linux environment as follow :
  export MOZ_USER_DIR=${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/mozilla
  export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=$MOZ_USER_DIR/plugins
  # moving mozilla user directory in the customized place
  mv ~/.mozilla ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/mozilla
  firefox


Actual results:

Running firefox, it didn't found my existing profile and created a new one in ~/.mozilla


Expected results:

Firefox, and other mozilla products, should provide and respect environment variables at least for the following elements :
 - the path were the configuration elements are stored
 - the path were the cached elements are stored

Optionaly it shoul also provide better granularity for stuff like applications, extensions and so on.

In my specific case, I would like to use XDG specification directories, but the more flexible the better.

Relevant document seems to be :
- http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/xpcom/io/nsAppFileLocationProvider.cpp
- http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ident?i=DEFAULT_PRODUCT_DIR
- http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of the longstanding "use XDG dirs" bug. This is not a high priority for the project, although I think we would take a patch that was sufficiently safe and kept existing users' profiles intact.

MOZ_USER_DIR is not a runtime configuration parameter, and epxorting it as you did should have no effect.

You can put the profile directory anywhere you like by launching Firefox with -profile /path/to/profile

Comment 2

[psychoslave]

Thanks for the `-profile` suggestion. But as far as I understand, it wouldn't enable me to move the whole ~/.mozilla content, which is my goal.

Can you suggest relevant documentation that I may read in order to make this patch ? I can code but I'm not familiar with the mozilla development tool chain.

Also, as I said, if I intent to use XDG specification directories, exposing mozilla specific environement variables seems far more interesting to. Less specific, more flexible, better portability. I didn't red the whole bug report, but it doesn't seems to suggest to go this way. I even red some post complaining about how hard migration would be with an distributed by topic profile: with a set of environement variables, you can easily stay backward compatible while allowing user to put their miscellaneous data where they like.

Looks like I can't post on the bug report you pointed, so I post here.

Looking foward for documentation enabling me to do the job.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I've un-restricted bug 259356 so you can comment there, although please read the entire bug in detail before commenting, to avoid duplication ;-)

When I say migration, I mean *automatic* migration, so that users don't have to set any environment variables and their Firefox continues to work seamlessly.