Closed Bug 318780 Opened 19 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Relocate user setting/preferences to ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 247973

People

(Reporter: moxfox, Unassigned)

References

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

As per Apple ADC documentation in:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Articles/WhereToPutFiles.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001411-BAJHCHJI
and
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Articles/LibraryDirectory.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002282-BAJHCHJI
the Thunderbird user configurable settings should be in ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/, not in ~/Library/Thunderbird.

The current location clutters the Library -directory and just is not correct for Mac OS X

Also, both Firefox and Sunbird are correctly located in their respective subdirectories of ~/Library/Application Support/

Reproducible: Always
I think this is covered by bug 247973.
Magnus: that bug discusses about moving Thunderbird under "Mozilla" directory. This is not relevant in Mac OS X -- or at least firefox (settings) are located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/

I think this is OS X -only configuration change and should not influence other platforms.
Glad to find this bug already exists; I just logged into Bugzilla to report it myself.
->NEW
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Flags: wanted-thunderbird3.0a1?
Flags: blocking-thunderbird3?
It's so odd that Thunderbird decides to put its stuff direcrly in Library/. This really need to be fixed.
I say Safari and iTunes should go first ;)

But, it's just like bug 247973 (of which this is really a dupe - they're both trivial one-liners that depend on rewriting how profiles are found) - you not only have to address what bug 247973 comment 19 says, and find profiles in the old location while still creating new ones in the new location, you also have to find a way to support downgrading, so that old versions can find profiles in the new location, which means you need to write to both profiles.ini files, which pretty much blows all your benefit: you still have the horror of ~/Library/Thunderbird/ existing, you've just added the confusion of having two directories, either one or both of which might have your profiles.

Practically speaking, I think your only hope is to write a profile migrator, and then wait for a change in profile files so massive that there's just no way to downgrade once a profile's changed, and use that change as an excuse to change location at the same time.
Assignee: mscott → nobody
Depends on: 247973
What needs to be done isn't in practise that much different than what Firefox 3 is doing with setting, compared to FF2.

Changing of major version number in Thunderbird is one of the best moments in time to change this.

I'd be happy even with a more direct approach, like the TB3 _moving_ the profile to it's appropriate place, mentioning this in the release notes/first startup and possibly giving users a manual description how to go back, if they want to do so.

As far as I understand the situation, profiles.ini is supposed to be the place where the location is decided. The actual settings are not supposed to be aware of the absolute location. Since there is a system already in place, why not use it?
(In reply to comment #7)
> But, it's just like bug 247973 (of which this is really a dupe - they're both
> trivial one-liners that depend on rewriting how profiles are found) - you not

Yes, this is really a dupe of bug 247973. And with a one-line patch it will be changed for each OS.

But anyway, we should really file a new bug for the profile migrator issue and mark it as blocking bug 247973. I will do that later today. Perhaps someone can dig in and write a patch, so we can re-activate bug 247973.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
No longer depends on: 247973
Flags: wanted-thunderbird3.0a1?
Flags: blocking-thunderbird3?
OS: Mac OS X → All
Hardware: Macintosh → All
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
Version: unspecified → Trunk
(In reply to comment #7)
I'm not sure downgrading is much of an issue if it's done the way that new installations use the old location, and new installations use the new location, we could just call downgrading to a version you never had installed unsupported.
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