1417900 - Make about:networking#logging work from the start of the browser

Status: NEW

(Core :: XPCOM, enhancement)

Description

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

What I want to suggest could fix few things with one shot:
- get child logs (fill in the sandbox entries early)
- get the log from the start of the browser ; people often start logging too late (understandably) after a problem has appeared, while the code path that caused it has already been hit and logging lost

What I want is to:
- add command line args for logging (-MOZ_LOG, -MOZ_LOG_FILE for simplicity)
- add a new button to about:networking#logging "Restart the browser with these settings" that would do an em restart with those args added, MOZ_LOG_FILE would update for child processes

This way it would work for just one sessions, start early and be convenient for the user.

Probably easiest would be just modify the environment (set the env vars according these two args) of the browser session early enough to let the existing logging and sandbox exception code "just work".

Comment 1

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

Restart can be done via "@mozilla.org/toolkit/app-startup;1", nsIAppStartup.  We will though need some new code to add extra command line args, I'm afraid.

Comment 2

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

I was working on this in the past and the best way would be to set the env vars rather then to try to add command line args.

I currently don't have time to work on this, but it would really be nice thing to have.  May become part of a larger project to improve our log-at-the-user experience.