86148 - Preferences directory should be settable outside of windows directory

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, enhancement)

Description

[Martin Petricek]

Mozilla tries to write user profiles under c:\win95\Mozilla
But since the directory is write-protected, it will fail and
it won't be able to write the profile. Mozilla doesn't even protest,
that the  diractory couldn't be created, it just silently don't write
the profile and I have all reset to default when I start mozilla again.
I have win98 SE here.

On another computer in school there is windows directory set to ramdisk,
and if the computer crashes, any changes to preferences, cookies, etc...
are gone since the the profile is on ramdisk and I won't manage
to save it back to network disk when staring at "blue screen of death, press
reset to continue".

There should be some option to set profiles direcory to somewhere else.
Older mozilla versions used users50 direcotory in root of the drive where
mozilla is installed, which happen to be here e:\users50 and m:\users50 in 
school
and it's writeable.

I think ideal solution will be some small .ini file or other plaintext
configuration file in directory with mozilla.exe binary that will say where to
look for user profiles directory (the default may be $windir for windows
and $HOME for unixes)

Comment 1

[timeless]

imo this bug is invalid:
mozilla -createprofile Name "c:\path" should work iirc
so would
mozilla -profilemanager
click create profile and browse for a path..

the only question is what about mozreg.dat or whatever.

Comment 2

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Yeah, the registry would still be a problem.

> I think ideal solution will be some small .ini file

There's several ways to go about it.  

Comment 3

[Martin Petricek]

Well, I can set the prefs directory to e:\users50\default where it was before,
but since mozilla is also unable to create the registry file, it won't even try
to load the profile from there when started again. (i suppose the path to
profile directory is stored there)
Another small problem is that when I pick the e:\users50\default as a profile
directory, it will create some subdirectory with some cryptic name like
"rkml4a28.slt" and put all the profile data into it, instead of the chosen
directory.

Comment 4

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

> (i suppose the path to profile directory is stored there)
That's right.

> it will create some subdirectory with some cryptic name like "rkml4a28.slt"
That's by design (for security) and is not going to change. If you want to know
the whole (long) story on that, see bug 56002.

Comment 5

[Grace Bush]

changing QA contact

Comment 6

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)

Comment 7

[Conrad Carlen (not reading bugmail)]

Setting to milestone that's not passed.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

What's the position on this now? How does mozilla know where to look for 
registry.dat and can the location where mozilla stores this file be changed?