304911 - read-only profiles.ini allows new profile creation, but doesn't save/write new profile in profiles.ini [silently fails]

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Josh Kelley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

I tried making profiles.ini read-only, to discourage users from creating new
Firefox profiles under their roaming profiles and bloating their roaming
profiles.  I was disappointed to find that Firefox will still happily create new
profiles even if it can't write their information to profiles.ini, and any
attempts that it makes to update profiles.ini silently fail.  Since the profile
data cannot be stored anywhere, the new profiles end up being orphaned upon exit.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Mark profiles.ini as read-only.
2. Run the Profile Manager and create a new profile.
3. Start that profile.
4. Exit Firefox.

Actual Results:  
New profile is created but is not recorded to profiles.ini.

Expected Results:  
Firefox errors out at step 2, or Firefox quietly makes profiles.ini writable.

Thunderbird has an identical bug.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Clearly nevers checks whether profiles.ini is writable or write was successful.