267502 - Cannot find profile when user application/"home" directory has moved or been renamed

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, defect)

Description

[Stewart Gordon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041101
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041101

This doesn't seem to be the same as bug 190297.

If Mozilla profiles are transferred between systems that have different user
directory structures (e.g. on the local machine on one, a network mount point on
another), then Mozilla fails to see that the profile is there.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use Mozilla on a networked system, with a lengthy pathname to the user's home
directory.
2. Transfer the profile to a system on which the user's home directory is stored
locally, as /Users/masg2 or similar.
3. Try to run Mozilla.

Actual Results:  
When starting up Mozilla, the dialog box to select a profile appears.  Profile
'default' (I never created any others) appears in the list.  If I try to
proceed, I get the error:

"Mozilla cannot use the profile "default" because the directory containing the
profile cannot be found.

Please choose another profile or create a new one."

I have ended up recreating my profile from scratch twice because of this.

It's particularly weird as it's first looking in the right place, then in the
wrong place - if I rename the Library/Mozilla folder, Mozilla works again but
the profile I had is gone.

I'm guessing it's down to an absolute path stored in secmod.db, which I probably
can't safely edit as it's a binary file.


Expected Results:  
Found the profile in /Users/masg2/Library/Mozilla where it was looking to
discover that I had a 'default' profile in the first place.

Comment 1

[Stewart Gordon]

The bug is exactly the same under Windows.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915

Haven't tried with anything more recent....

Comment 2

[Peter Åstrand]

It seems like the absolute path of the profile directory is hard-coded into both ~/.mozilla/appreg and ~/.mozilla/mozver.dat. This is far from optimal. 

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This bug is filed in a bugzilla component related to pre-Firefox code which no longer exists. I believe it is no longer relevant and I am therefore closing it INCOMPLETE.

If you believe that this bug is still valid and needs to be fixed, please reopen it and move it to the Toolkit:Startup and Profile System product/component.