1391598 - Please implement a probe to get more information about username profile path

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

In the 55, we had at least to two bugs related to path containing some unexpected chars:
* bug 1388584 - single quote
* bug 1389160 - non-ascii char

We have no clue how many people are impacted by this issue.

Having some telemetry to know:
* ascii only
* contains punctuation (', ., space, etc)
* using unicode
would be very helpful in the future in case we hit similar issues

Comment 1

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Georg, do you know who could write that?

Comment 2

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Gijs, do you have an idea on this?
What a good place for implementing probes on user profile paths is?
What component this bug should go to?
Potentially which team could own or mentor this?

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] from comment #2)
> Gijs, do you have an idea on this?
> What a good place for implementing probes on user profile paths is?

Can we easily get stats on the client environment information we send with telemetry? If so, I think it should be part of that.

> What component this bug should go to?

Telemetry? What's wrong with this component?

> Potentially which team could own or mentor this?

It's not clear to me what you're asking. I would have to look up how to add stuff to the telemetry environment, but getting the profile path string is easy, and after that it's just a question of doing string manipulation, right?

Services.dirsvc.get("ProfD", Ci.nsIFile).path

gets you the profile path (after startup - during startup, you need something other than ProfD).

Does that answer your questions?

If the underlying question is "do you (or someone you know) have time to drive this", then I'm afraid the answer is "not right now". If nobody on the telemetry team can do it, and we still think this is a priority, then I suggest pinging people higher up to find a manager who has someone on their team who they think has time to do this.

Comment 4

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Do we completely break some Asian installs if the telemetry usage is low? I don't think it is appropriate to use telemetry here.
We should rather completely ban fopen, openm etc.

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

> Do we completely break some Asian installs if the telemetry usage is low?
Of course not, it is just to have an understanding of the situation. For example, the single quote issue, I wish I had some number before to know how fast I should have disabled updates.

> We should rather completely ban fopen, openm etc.
Ditto, I asked for some static analysis checkers to detect that (I will report a bug)

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

> Ditto, I asked for some static analysis checkers to detect that (I will report a bug)
done in bug 1391711

Comment 7

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Moving this to Firefox::General - if this might get implemented, it is possibly a Firefox Telemetry probe.
That team might know if this is something we currently want to add or not.