399892 - allow custom profile root dir with XRE_main

Status: NEW

Description

[Christian Persch (GNOME) (away; not receiving bug mail)]

Created attachment 284988 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed patch

On linux, both the profile root dir and the profile local root dir are ~/.vendor/appname . However, for my application I need to relocate the directory somewhere else: the desired directory is under ~/.config/appname (root) resp. ~/.cache/appname (local root) (following the XDG base dir spec), while vendor is "GNOME" which would result in both being under ~/.gnome .

The solution I came up with is to extend nsXREAppData to allow passing an application dir provider to XRE_main (like passing one to XRE_InitEmbedding) and this app dir provider will be queried for these directories as XRE_USER[_LOCAL]_APP_DATA_DIR. If the app dir provider doesn't implement these keys, the code will fall back to the old directories (~/.vendor/appname on linux).

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I believe something like this was already implemented as bug 396209... what is the relationship between this patch and that one?

Comment 2

[Ted Mielczarek [:ted.mielczarek]]

I think what bent implemented there will do this.  To be fair, that landed very recently, and it's probably not documented anywhere.

Comment 3

[Christian Persch (GNOME) (away; not receiving bug mail)]

You're right that this is somewhat similar to bug 396209. (I had started this work before that bug landed, and didn't think it had anything to do with my problem.) It's not quite sufficient however:
Specifying the Profile key in the .ini file will point both the profile root and the profile local root (cache files) to $HOME/$Profile.
I on the other hand want to point them to different directories. Additionally, the directories are not static, but depend on environment variables ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_CACHE_HOME resp; ~/.config and ~/.cache are their fallback values).

I can see two ways to fix my problem then:

* Since the problem is Profile being relative to $HOME, add ProfileRoot and ProfileLocalRoot entries in the .ini (and nsXREAppData), which will be used to construct these directories as $Profile[Local]Root/$Profile and substitute env vars (with fallback! since those env vars may be unset; maybe in sh syntax ${VAR:-fallback}).

* My approach above. Seems easier to me, but only works with XRE_main called from code, not with xulrunner + .ini file. I guess one could implement an app dir provider in nsAppData.cpp that takes its keys from a section of the .ini file...  :)

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Comment on attachment 284988 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed patch

It's too late in 1.9 for this new feature IMO, and this is all going to change in moz2. So I think this should be WONTFIX