1774953 - (tb-xplatform) [meta] Issues impacting cross platform OS portability of Thunderbird profiles

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Absolute paths, or full directory names, exist within thunderbird profile data, unfortunately. This makes some files (and indeed any profile) not fully portable, preventing the ability to just copy a profile to a different location and use it without problems.

Files mentioned in the blocking bugs must be edited.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Checking Bug 888371, bug 950584, and others, the absolute paths should no longer be required in prefs.js for modern versions of Thunderbird - relative path preferences exist for root.newsrc_root-rel, root.imap-rel, root.nntp-rel, root.none-rel, root.pop3-rel, server<something>.directory-rel for Mail/smart mailboxes. For some reason absolute path prefs are still maintained for each of these relative paths, but I think we could proceed to kill that off.

That leaves benc's recently created 1726660 - Folder cache (folderCache.json) uses absolute path of the db file (.msf) as the per-folder key, which is needlessly tied to profile dir location

Do we know of any other absolute prefs usage or a way to check for it? Or other portability issues?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Add-ons may introduce absolute paths. We may not be able to prevent this, but we should warn in documentation or detect. I found an example in my prefs.js related to tonequilla
type="17"
action="Custom"
customId="[e-mail]#playSound"
actionValue="file:///C:/Users/Wayne/AppData/Roaming/thunderbird/Profiles/9a159fc8.default/extensions/[e-mail]/sounds/drumriff.wav"
condition=...