[Windmill-dev] Firefox profiles in linux

[Mikeal Rogers]

Well, as you may notice I just checked in the linux profile support  
today, and I still haven't marked the ticket fixed because I haven't  
actually gotten them to work yet :)

This is the top windmill bug on my plate ( although some other non- 
windmill work came up that will be filling me out to the end of the  
week ).

One question; I can get the browser to launch on firefox, but it  
doesn't seem to be actually using the profile ( the proxy should be  
configured and the home page should be changed, but it's all just  
default ). Is this actually working for you?

A quick little history lesson on this issue -- On Mac, Windows and  
cygwin we just use the -profile option, which allows use to build out  
a custom profile in /tmp and just point FF at it without mucking  
around in the ProfileManager at all. For some completely unexplained  
reason this option doesn't work on linux, I can find no documentation  
that might help, no debug info from firefox, and #firefox on  
irc.mozilla.org is no help what so ever.

Since this wasn't working I tried the method you are seeing now,  
which is so much worse and more error prone. Even after i get the  
cleanup code going in and ripping out the windmill entry in  
profiles.ini this doesn't help if you have to kill windmill manually!

So now it seems I may be back to square one. Maybe I'll send some  
personal emails to people at mozilla I know, or take another stab at  
their mailing list.

I really do hope to finish this up over the weekend, it's the last  
windmill bug I have targeted for 0.2-Beta.

-Mikeal


On Aug 7, 2007, at 8:07 PM, Barry Stump wrote:

> (ignore if this is not the correct place to report a problem with  
> windmill)
>
> OS: Kubuntu Feisty
> Firefox: 2.0.0.6
>
> Windmill is now able to create a named profile in firefox under linux
> (yay!), but the clean up procedure is not quite correct.  It removes
> the temporary profile directory, but firefox still retains the named
> profile (now pointing to nothing) in the profiles.ini file.  This
> means that (for me at least), the first launch of firefox from
> windmill is successful, but subsequent launches get an empty profile,
> even though firefox was launched with the -P option.  If the entry in
> profiles.ini is removed (either manually or by launching firefox
> -ProfileManager and clicking "delete"), everything works correctly.
> Unfortunately, there is no way that I can find of removing a profile
> via command line parameters to the firefox binary under linux.  So
> windmill will have to remove the "windmill" profile entry from the
> profiles.ini file, usually located at
> $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini
>
> If this wasn't my first foray into Python, I'd submit a patch, but
> someone else will surely be able to fix this faster and cleaner than
> me.
>
> On a side note, your OSCON presentation was awesome.  Keep up the  
> good work.
>
> -Barry
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