952757 - Move panacea.dat, designed for caching purposes, to cache location [1]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Database, enhancement)

Description

[Ulf Zibis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131206152142



Actual results:

Some data, designed for caching purposes, currently is located in profile, e.g. extensions.ini, panacea.dat.


Expected results:

IMO profile should be light-weighted and kept clean from caching data. Only primary defining data should be held in profile.
Sometimes, the profile is located in a network location, so keeping it small would reduce network traffic.
It also would help reducing the footprint of regular backup.

Instructions like "file xxx could be deleted, it will be regenerated automatically" [2] should only apply on files in cache location [1].

And at least if would help for a clean structured architecture of Mozilla products.

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Thunderbird#Files_and_folders_in_the_profile

Comment 1

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Only one issue issue per bug report please.  I'm changing this bug to be about panacea.dat.
Please file a separate bug for extensions.ini, in the "Toolkit/Startup and Profile system"
component.  Thanks.

Comment 2

[Ulf Zibis]

This bug was meant for all Mozilla Products, so I'm not sure, if MailNews Core is matching for e.g Firefox.
I your terminology you may call it "Meta Bug".

"panacea.dat, designed for caching purposes" in summary determines panacea.dat to be only of caching purpose. This may not be true, so panacea.dat is not good candidate to "reduce this bug to one issue".
A more secure case would be extensions.ini.
So I better would have written: Candidates for examination: extensions.ini, panacea.dat.

I do not understand why you changed the version. In my understanding, this field is meant for where the bug was observed, and not in which version the bug is scheduled for fix. Theoretically the requested change is already done in a alpha version, then this bug would be invalid.

Do you really think, changing the location architecture of files is a "Database" issue?

Please Mats, review your change and consider adding "Meta" to the summary.

Comment 3

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Feel free to update the summary if I misunderstood the intention for what you
want to do with panacea.dat, but please keep this bug about panacea.dat only.
(I picked MailNews Core/Database because I saw some other bugs about this file
in this Bugzilla component)

panacea.dat isn't used by Firefox (afaik).  Each of these files will need to
have separate bugs since each need separate analysis, review and tracking etc.
I don't see the need to have a meta bug unless you intend to file a large
number of bugs.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This issue will be obsoleted by Bug 418551 - Convert panacea.dat from mork to another database format