[Windmill-dev] Firefox profiles in linux

[Barry Stump]

I've seen the symptoms you describe (firefox launches but with a
default profile) upon running windmill when a "windmill" profile
already exists from a previous run (but the /tmp profile directory has
been cleaned up).  If you delete the profile (by running firefox
-ProfileManager) and invoke windmill again, it works correctly, at
least for me.

Perhaps it would be simpler (on linux) to create the profile during
the windmill setup/install phase, in a permanent location, and then
windmill can execute firefox -P "windmill" upon execution.  Just a
thought.  I did some digging in the firefox launch scripts and can
find no easy way to duplicate the -profile option of OS X, or even
remove a profile via the command line.

-Barry

On 8/7/07, Mikeal Rogers <mikeal at osafoundation.org> wrote:
> 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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> > Windmill-dev at osafoundation.org
> > http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/windmill-dev
>
>