202221 - --enable-single-profile needs better description

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: Build Config, defect)

Description

[Steven Augart]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030414
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030414

I downloaded the mozilla 1.4 source code tarball, from the above URL.

I untarred it and ran the configurator, which gave me a .mozconfig file (to be
attached to this bug report.

Compilation failed, complaining:

nsMessengerMigrator.cpp:90:63: nsIPrefMigration.h: No such file or directory

I cannot find any file named nsIPrefMigration.h in the source tree.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.untar ....bz2 file.
2. install .mozconfig file in root of build directory (same one containing
"configure"
3. make -f client.mk build

Actual Results:  
After lots of activity, the build failed with the error:
   nsMessengerMigrator.cpp:90:63: nsIPrefMigration.h: No such file or directory


Expected Results:  
Succeeded in building, I think.

I am darned curious about where nsIPrefMigration.h is supposed to be.  There is
an nsIPrefMigration.h present in the tree that lxr.mozilla.org coughs up. 
However, I have no idea whether that file is supposed to be generated under
normal circumstances.

I built Mozilla on an AMD Athlon 700 running SuSE Linux 8.1.  There are still 2
GB of disk space free on the partition I ran the build on.

Comment 1

[Steven Augart]

Attachment: The .mozconfig file I used.

Comment 2

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

The pref-migrator module does not get compile when --enable-single-profile is
used.   Mailnews depends upon this module.  We have 3 choices here:
1) Make the interface always available and expect the code to do the right thing
if the service cannot be instantiated
2) Removed the dependency from mailnews
3) Add a check to configure.in and force the build to fail if
--enable-single-profile used with code that requires the pref-migrator.

Comment 3

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Doug, is building mozilla with --enable-single-profile supported? I don't see
code in nsAppRunner that hooks up a nsProfileDirServiceProvider like
single-profile embedding apps do.

Comment 4

[Steven Augart]

Christopher Seawood: Thanks for the quick response on this.  I reran configure
without --enable-single-profile, and my build is chugging away nicely now, well
past the point of the failure I reported.  (As I write this, it's finished; hooray!)

Also, my original problem report contained a factual error.  I wrote:
> There is
> an nsIPrefMigration.h present in the tree that lxr.mozilla.org coughs up. 

There is no such file in the CVS base.  The file I was looking at through LXR is
actually nsPrefMigration.h, without an "I".  So it makes sense to me now.

Comment 5

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

it is not supported by the mozilla client.  feel free to mark invalid.  Or mark
this as a RFE and assign it to the browser general category.

Comment 6

[Steven Augart]

Re Comment #3: My use of the --enable-single-profile flag was due to ignorance;
I thought "hey, I only use one profile, so I'll cut some cruft out.  Wonder how
that works."  Perhaps there is a documentation issue here, where the configure
help needs to explain that --enable-single-profile is only for certain
specialized uses (what they are is beyond me, but that's another story).

Or perhaps (with respect to Doug's comment #5) this should be an RFE for the
configurator, so that it doesn't even offer --enable-single-profile for people
trying to configure and build the lizard, or warns the user that he or she will
have to disable other parts of Mozilla to use that option.

Comment 7

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

Grrr.  If this option isn't going to work in a certain build combination, then
it needs to be documented somewhere with the appropriate checks added.  Merely
saying "this isn't supported by the mozilla client" isn't good enough since the
client is what the vast majority of the people are using configure to build. 
That's a really good way of getting the configure option demoted to a private
env variable setting.

Comment 8

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 9

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier]

I compiled MOZILLA_1_4_BRANCH with --enable-single-profile but running ./mozilla or ./run-mozilla.sh returned to the shell prompt without printing anything (in the builds with debug disabled). If this option isn't supported it may be marked as is in configure.in. Did it ever worked ? I also thought it was fine to enable it since I use a single profile. With the failures I thought the problem was elsewhere. Before enabling debug I tried with just -O2, GCC 2.95.4 instead of 3.3, and even GTK+ 1.2.10 instead of 2.2.2.

I uploaded 2 broken .mozconfig to http://www.fredlwm.hpg.com.br/tmp/mozilla/mozconfig-debug.txt and http://www.fredlwm.hpg.com.b/tmp/mozilla/mozconfig-debug-2.txt , and a working to http://www.fredlwm.hpg.com.br/tmp/mozilla/mozconfig-optimized.txt just is case someone is interested. The second is without --enable-single-profile . It starts but segfaults after I press a button to finish creating or converting a profile.

And thanks to the #Mozilla folks who helped me debug it.

Comment 10

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

It's been said on this bug before that --enable-single-profile is not supported
by the mozilla client. 

While most people are building the mozilla client, there is pretty big
motivation to support builds of other products ;-) The --enable-single-profile
option is useful for embedding apps and has every right to be a configure
option. It just needs to be commented clearly. Maybe "not-for-mozilla" options
should be moved into their own group?

As it is, this bug is INVALID. If we want to turn it into
"--enable-single-profile needs better comments", it's a good bug.

Comment 11

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier]

It turns out I had others enabled which break the build. --disable-xpfe-components and maybe --disable-profilesharing. I didn't test the latter alone. --disable-necko-disk-cache (it doesn't create the Cache directory, even though the according menus are still there) and --disable-xpinstall work. These are all new options I tested. The others were already in my earliers .mozconfig. I uploaded my new working .mozconfig to http://www.fredlwm.hpg.com.br/tmp/mozilla/mozconfig-optimized.txt

All is fine now (after ~15 builds).

Comment 12

[Andrew Schultz]

*** Bug 235181 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

A current description would be "--enable-single-profile has been gone for almost two years now."