170393 - Proifle handling is horribly useless

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: Migration, defect)

Description

[Dan]

The way that mozilla handles Profiles is horrible.  

Here is what I am attempting to do:

I used to have NT4.  Now I have W2K.

NT4 stored my profiles in c:\winnt\profiles\foo\application data\mozilla\profiles
W2K stores them in c:\documents and settings\foo\application data\mozilla\profiles

I cannot find any way to make mozilla use my old profile!!!!

I copied it to the profiles directory, and it ignores it.  I copied it over a
new default profile that I made, and it puts up an error message I can't read. 
Then closes.  

I can't find a way to export a profile (on the old machine), and it has no
import option.  It doesn't even have an open profile option!!  How exactly does
it go about discovering what profiles are available to choose from?

I discovered that several of the files in the profile have a hard coded full
non-relative path in them (WHY???  This is a very bad idea.  All paths inside of
the profile should be relative to the root directory of the profile - at it
causes the profile to be a useless heap of junk as soon as you move it from one
folder to another....) so that explains why it crashes.  But if it is going to
be written that poorly, you could at least give us an import option.

If I have missed something obvious, let me know.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

a) This is no support Forum (use IRC or the newsgroups for that)
b) please search before you file a bug (abolute paths..., Import/Export Profile)
c) ALWAYS add a build ID in a bug report

marking invalid because this seem to be a support question and the reporter
didn't search before he filed this bug or asked on IRC/Newsgroups

You can try to the way on my very ugly and bad site.
http://www.mversen.de , click on Mozilla, Profile repair

Comment 2

[Dan]

Wow.  From what I gather on your website, and on other bugs here, there is no
way to move a profile from one place, (or one computer) to another without
manually hacking a lot of files in the profile, jumping through 50 hoops, and
then crossing your fingers.

It may be a support question.  

But, in my opinion, this is a hell of a lack of functionality to have.  This
should be marked as a Request for enhancement, and duped into one of the others
then.  It shouldn't take a CSCI geek a 1/2 of a day to migrate his mozilla
profile from one machine to another.  And I'm still not sure that I can do it in
that amount of time, as it appears that I have to learn half of the internals of
the profile file storage.  Plus, I'm still going to lose some info, as I can't
easily modify the binary files that have hard coded paths.  What a horrible
design.  

Comment 3

[Wesha]

Daniel, you're not migrating from one machine to another. You're migrating from
one _OS_ to another, and it's quite a difference.

It might be a good RFE though, so why won't you file one?

This bug the way it's reported is definitely INVALID.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

We have already this bugs :
Import/Export Profile (bug 22689)
change the paths to relative (bug 138989, bug 165841 and others)