341976 - storage.sdb entries should not use absolute paths to search plugins files (storage size optimization)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Régis Caspar]

Since the landing of bug 335101, some preferences related to search plugins are stored in "storage.sdb". In this file, absolute paths to each installed search plug-in are stored. Stored value should use some kind of TAG (e.g. "[Profile]" + PATH_SEPARATOR + "foo.xml") and not full paths in order minimize storage size.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Full URIs are used to uniquely identify engine files, since there are multiple possible locations for engine files other than the profile (extension, app-dir). 

The storage size of full paths is minimal compared to other metadata stored in the profile, and the code complexity that would be required to support this isn't worth the minimal space savings.

I recommend WONTFIX.

Comment 2

[Régis Caspar]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Full URIs are used to uniquely identify engine files, since there are multiple
> possible locations for engine files other than the profile (extension,
> app-dir). 
That doesn't block the possibility to use "[extension]\foo.xml" "[app-dir]\bar.xml".

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I still don't think it's worth the effort. Are you really that concerned about the 100 or so bytes per engine that this would save? :)

Comment 4

[Régis Caspar]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I still don't think it's worth the effort. Are you really that concerned about
> the 100 or so bytes per engine that this would save? :)
Having 320gigs of HD space I would say no :) 
Just to have some mathematics into this:
I've 29 search engines. 12ko with actual storage logic and 5ko with [app-dir] and 
[profile].

But this can be WONTFIX'ed if you want, that was just a proposal/remark

Comment 5

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

For the sake of the argument, using keys would allow people to move profile
data from one machine to the other, and it'd probably help projects like
portable fox.

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> For the sake of the argument, using keys would allow people to move profile
> data from one machine to the other, and it'd probably help projects like
> portable fox.

You're right, I hadn't considered the portable Firefox use-case, and now that I think of it a bit more, it shouldn't be too complicated. I'll make a patch - I think we should land this at the same time as bug 341975 to avoid breaking existing profiles.

Comment 7

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Attachment: patch

There isn't very much we can do about extension-shipped plugins, since those can be anywhere, so this keeps the full path for anything that's non-profile or non-app.

Comment 8

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 226126 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

I want to land this with the patch to change the engine metadata file.

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

mozilla/browser/components/search/nsSearchService.js 	1.1.2.33

Comment 10

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

mozilla/browser/components/search/nsSearchService.js 	1.41