551556 - simplify --profiledir command line flag to just --profile

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

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

It seems unnecessary to include "dir" in the flag that lets you specify the profile directory to use when running or testing your extension, as all arguments to the flag are directories.

And even if we later extended the flag to let you specify profile manager-managed profiles, it would be relatively easy to distinguish values that represent directories from those that represent managed profile names, since the latter wouldn't contain path separators and would be in the list of managed profiles.

Thus it seems like this flag would be more simply named --profile.  And as a bonus, this would be consistent with the name of the Firefox flag that provides the equivalent functionality.

Comment 1

[Atul Varma [:atul]]

That's a good idea overall, though I should note that one of the reasons I added 'dir' to the end of the name was just to keep the naming of command-line options consistent, as all other directory-options end with it--e.g. --srcdir, --objdir, --pkgdir, etc.

Not saying that this justifies the naming, just adding context. :)

Comment 2

[Atul Varma [:atul]]

Noelle, please let us know if you have any thoughts on this.

Comment 3

[Noelle Murata]

On the fence, but leaning slightly in the direction of --profile. Generally, I'm for consistent naming conventions, but in this case it seems more readable and not-ambiguous to simply use --profile.

My $0.02...

Comment 4

[Atul Varma [:atul]]

Sounds good! Let us bust it up then.

We should definitely make sure the change gets mentioned in the release notes... Myk, do you think there's some kind of whiteboard info we should add to bugs that mention things which we need to make sure to mention in release notes?

I don't think we mention '--profiledir' anywhere in the documentation at present, but whoever reviews the patch should probably do a repo-wide grep of that string to make sure it doesn't appear anywhere anymore.

Comment 5

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

(In reply to comment #4)
> Myk, do you think there's some kind of whiteboard info we should add
> to bugs that mention things which we need to make sure to mention in release
> notes?

Let's use the relnote keyword.  Also, let's deprecate --profiledir in the next release and remove it in the one after that.

Comment 6

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

The Add-on SDK is no longer a Mozilla Labs experiment and has become a big enough project to warrant its own Bugzilla product, so the "Add-on SDK" product has been created for it, and I am moving its bugs to that product.

To filter bugmail related to this change, filter on the word "looptid".

Comment 7

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

We're in beta, which is too late to make these kinds of breaking changes.