1247988 - User friendly profile manager

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement, P5)

Description

[noitidart]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160208194709

Steps to reproduce:

Writing an addon that offers this user friendly profile manager with these features:
* Desktop Shortcuts
* Cloning Profiles
* Badging
* Taskbar/Dock Seperation
* Show temporary profiles in menu (profiles that do not have an entry in the ini)
* Tie profile to build
* Filter profiles by typing name
* Hotkeys to navigate up/down and hit enter to execute default function
* Ability to create profile at custom path by typing in full path into "create new profile" filed and hit Alt + Shift + Enter



The beta version is here - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/versions/beta


The only issue I cannot handle after about a year of research, is that I cannot get profiles launched in Mac, to read through the symlink. In Mac each launch profile is tied to its on custom .app bundle. This .app bundle is symlinked to the target build (ie: firefox.app, nightly.app, dev.app, etc). So if you check OS.Constants.Path, you will see some paths are now going to my custom .app

These are the paths affected: 
XREExeF
XREAppDist
DefRt
PrfDef
profDef
ProfDefNoLoc
ARes
AChrom
APlugns
SrchPlugns
XPIClnupD
CurProcD
XCurProcD
XpcomLib
GreD
GreBinD

//group
UpdRootD

//group
ProfLDS
ProfLD

I group these in three groups. Each group needs a path fix to a certain real path: https://github.com/Noitidart/Profilist/blob/mac-iconing-alpha/bootstrap.js#L6470-L6535

However patching it like this is not right. The way to fix this is to make mac readsymlink to see what is behind it.

Comment 1

[noitidart]

NI blease @baku

Comment 2

[noitidart]

NI please @bram

Comment 3

[noitidart]

Continuing discussion from here - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/Cqbd8YkrMmk/fc6ustU2AgAJ

Comment 4

[Bram Pitoyo [:bram]]

Hi Noit,

Do you think this work could be aligned with the work :baku is doing on about:profiles on bug 1240022, or do you think that these functionalities are best provided through an add-on?

Comment 5

[noitidart]

(In reply to Bram Pitoyo [:bram] from comment #4)
> Hi Noit,
> 
> Do you think this work could be aligned with the work :baku is doing on
> about:profiles on bug 1240022, or do you think that these functionalities
> are best provided through an add-on?

Thanks Bram. Ideally this should be in Firefox and not an addon. However this addon is very feature rich and is trying to bypass the profile manager completely. Reason I wanted to bypass that is was just my thought of "Profile Manager" feels out of place. Even Google Chrome does not have such a thing, they offer profile manager in each process. And if users want to launch into a specific one they should use the desktop launcher.

The expanding/contracting UI in the hamburger menu might not fit with your UI team. However I got rave feedback on that. So maybe if we did land all features of profilist v3 in 1240022, then we should probably bring in the expanding feature in the hamburger menu via addon. If the expanding/contracting does sit well with UI team, I have no problems abandoning addon completely.

From a non-ui point of view with profilist v3 - the huge issue is getting Mac to read through the symlink to see the actual path.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

As an addon, I don't think we need to track this in the Mozilla bugtracker. notidart do you disagree? This is currently not assigned to you.

Comment 7

[noitidart]

Thanks @bsmedberg for asking. Yep makes total sense. The real bug I mentioned in the end of this original topic post. Its that on Mac OS X, when we use symlinks, those special paths are not seeing through them, and using the path to the symlink. This breaks the update process and some other stuff I can't recall right now.Should I create another bug for that?

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Yes please! I'm interested in what API surface you're using.

Comment 9

[noitidart]

Thanks brother will make it right now and share link with you. :)

Comment 10

[noitidart]

Hi there @Benjamin - thanks so much for the interest in this, please see the bug here, with screenshot of end goal in action - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1281854