406969 - Need a way to export/import ChatZilla Preferences

Status: NEW

(Other Applications :: ChatZilla, enhancement)

Description

[Martin Oberhuber]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: 0.9.79

I've been changing my main computer and need a way to migrate my ChatZilla settings from the old installation to the new one.

If there already exists a method by copying / editing some Preferences file I'd be fine with that, but I'd request that information be added to the FAQ.

Otherwise, Export/Import buttons should be added to the Preferences dialog, or corresponding menu items should be added to the ChatZilla menu.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Open the prefs.js file in your profile, copy everything that mentions "extensions.irc".

See also: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox#Preferences

Keep in mind the logging paths are stored as absolute paths, which means they will be wrong when you move your profile, so you will need to adjust them accordingly.


Having import/export functionality in the perf window... hrm. I'm not sure how hard that would be. It's possible, sure, but probably not *really* easy to do.

Comment 2

[James Ross]

It would be really hard, especially as we potentially have multiple files to include and can't write a zip of them ourselves. We'd also have to fix the paths automatically, which is hard.

Comment 3

[Martin Oberhuber]

Ok, copying the settings from prefs.js was really easy. Since I had not modified the default paths for logging, there wasn't even any manual modification required.

I copied my entire Thunderbird profile that way, and now I also got Chatzilla migrated, including my auto-logon scripts. Awsome!

It might be obvious for people very involved with Mozilla products that all the stuff is in the Profile/*.js files, but for me it was not obvious at all. I'm perfectly fine with editing the files, but could that valuable piece of information be made more accessible for users?

Comment 4

[James Ross]

I think we can easily stretch to a FAQ entry on migration. :)

Comment 5

[Will Pittenger]

I would suggest making import/export a separate downloadable utility.  Many users that run cZ inside a browser can simply copy their entire profile when installing on a new machine.  Those that run cZ as a stand-alone app with XR can do that as well.  It's only those switching from a browser add-on to the XR app or vice-versa that need such an option.

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Will Pittenger from comment #5)
> I would suggest making import/export a separate downloadable utility.  Many
> users that run cZ inside a browser can simply copy their entire profile when
> installing on a new machine.  Those that run cZ as a stand-alone app with XR
> can do that as well.  It's only those switching from a browser add-on to the
> XR app or vice-versa that need such an option.

Even when moving from one browser to another, or from one profile to another for a single browser, you may not necessarily want to copy your whole profile. For instance, when moving from SeaMonkey to Firefox anything mail-related would be pure ballast & bloat on arrival. Between two different profiles of a single browser, they may be configured differently and you may want to keep those differences.

So what do we need to export and import? I see the following:
- All extensions.irc.* preferences, though depending on circumstances you might want to reset some of them to their default (e.g., when exporting to someone else's browser to set it up, you don't want to keep nicknames, and certainly not autoperform lines for "msg Nickserv identify somepasswd" at startup).
- Stuff in the chatzilla/ subdirectory of your profile. Here too you may want to keep some parts and discard others (e.g., depending on circumstances, I suppose you may or may not want to keep old logs).

What else?