204583 - location of registry.dat file cannot be changed - file cannot be stored user-independently which inhibits users from seeing all profiles

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 141780

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, enhancement)

Description

[Hans-Juergen Mauser]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; de-DE; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 (CK-UKT-IM2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla 1.3, Mozilla 1.2.1, Netscape 7.01 (all running Windows NT)

In Netscape 4.xx it was possible that every user could see the complete list of
profiles on the system, no matter who was logged in at the moment. Now with
Mozilla, even the _list_ of profiles is user-dependent which causes a lot of
trouble in some cases. For example, if you want (as system administrator) to
convert all the users' profiles at once, you can of course do that, but the list
of profiles can only be seen when _you_ are logged in.

For security reasons, I think it is acceptable that the profile data itself is
stored by default in the user's "home" directory, but it should be possible (as
an option) to make at least the list of profiles available for all users because
this is really needed in some cases (and this problem prevents us here from
switching to Netscape 7.x or Mozilla!)

Or, if this is impossible, there should be an option (for example an environment
variable to specify a directory) to get back the "old" behaviour of Netscape
4.xx to choose a system-wide profile directory for all users. On systems with a
lot of users and not only personal, but also "group" login user-names, such a
solution is really necessary to keep some kind of order in the directories and
to avoid user problems when they want to access their profile both from a
"common" login account and from their "personal" login account.

Please do not start discussions about the importance of the "security" features
like it happens in all the "xxxxxx.slt" bugs and topics. Such decisions should
be allowed to each user - who can be really annoyed if he/she cannot choose, but
instead has to try some odd tricks to enforce the behaviour he wants.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. no steps available...

Actual Results:  
-> see "Desription" and "Details"

Expected Results:  
-> see "Desription" and "Details"

Comment 1

[Hans-Juergen Mauser]

*** Bug 204584 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Hermann Schwab]

DUPE of Bug 141780 [RFE] Need a means to specify where registry.dat is stored.

have a look a comments there.

Comment 3

[Hans-Juergen Mauser]

The basic "problem" in the beginnig really seems to be the same,
but for the details it is different anyway, and copying the whole profiles, as
advised in the comments on Bug 141780, is not a possible solution because of the
absolute paths in all the configuration files and "registry.dat".
Additionally, I asked you for a possibility to change the location of
registry.dat (or the whole profiles) by _default_ and not for only one profile
at a time. It is impossible to get this done "by hand" if you have about 150-200
computers and 3 to 12 users (profiles) on each - as the profiles have to be
converted from Netscape 4.xx first. In this converting process you have no
chance to relocate the profile "in one step" - this would have to be done
afterwards for each manually, and that is definitely too much.

Comment 4

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 141780 ***

Comment 5

[Grace Bush]

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