442798 - starting Firefox with empty profile directory displays "already open" dialog

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 278860

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

When I start Firefox with the -profile <empty directory> command-line flag on Mac, it reports "Close Firefox - A copy of Firefox is already open.  Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time." and then quits.

Some profile files get created in the directory, but not the full complement, so the bug apparently gets triggered partway through the profile setup process:

Here's what the profile directory looks like on Mac afterwards:

h-160:~ myk$ mkdir foo; /Applications/Minefield.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profile foo; ls foo
XPC.mfasl		extensions		permissions.sqlite
XUL.mfasl		extensions.cache	prefs.js
compatibility.ini	extensions.ini		xpti.dat
compreg.dat		minidumps

Here's what it looks like on Linux, where starting Firefox with an empty profile directory works fine:

myk@myk:~$ mkdir foo; firefox -profile foo; ls foo
bookmarkbackups       extensions.rdf      search.sqlite
Cache                 formhistory.sqlite  secmod.db
cert8.db              key3.db             sessionstore.js
compatibility.ini     localstore.rdf      signons3.txt
compreg.dat           mimeTypes.rdf       urlclassifier3.sqlite
content-prefs.sqlite  minidumps           urlclassifierkey3.txt
cookies.sqlite        permissions.sqlite  XPC.mfasl
extensions            places.sqlite       xpti.dat
extensions.cache      pluginreg.dat       XUL.mfasl
extensions.ini        prefs.js

According to comments in bug 278860, which describes a similar problem when the profile directory doesn't exist, specifying an empty profile directory is supposed to work.  And it seems like it must work before we can remove the profile manager (bug 214675?), as bsmedmerg has suggested we are going to do for Mozilla 2, or else creating a profile will be prohibitively complicated.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Note: I have checked to make sure no other process (whether named Firefox, Minefield or GranParadiso) is running, and my terminal has MOZ_NO_REMOTE set to 1 (on both OSes).  Unsetting that environment variable doesn't make a difference.

Comment 2

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I've confirmed this.

I'm not sure what we can do about it (i.e. what the changes would be, and where they would go).

For what it's worth, the "-profile foo" syntax doesn't show up when you do "firefox -help" on either OS X or Linux.

Comment 3

[programming]

In the profiles folder there is a profiles.ini file which points to the active profile. If that profile isn't there this message occurs.

Comment 4

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Same issue as one of bug 278860 or bugs listed in Dependency Tree for bug 278860, isn't it?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

agree with wada, this is fundamentally bug 278860