Just thinking, but what if each profile remembered what channel it was
meant for? When using a profile in a different channel, you would have
an option to create a backup of the profile. If you were going forward,
you would get a simple notification that your profile's channel was
being advanced and ask if you're sure you want to do that. If you were
going backwards, it would blast you with scary warnings about data loss
(but both directions would provide a backup option.)
I would expect try to default to the nightly channel? It's not
foolproof, especially if your try push includes a one-way IDB upgrade,
but it would seem to cover the common case of mangling a
release/beta/dev edition profile.
And that's just from a UX standpoint. I have no idea what order things
happen in and whether this would require a separate ProfileManager to
pop up before the browser got properly started or whatever.
On 04/08/2015 02:15 PM, Seth Fowler wrote:
My concern with an approach like this is that it’s opt-in, and developers may
not necessarily keep this issue in mind every time they offer a build for
someone to try.
I’ve seen other developers suggest that users experiment with try builds, but
I’m not sure how widespread it is. Probably suggesting that users try to
reproduce the problem on Nightly is much more widespread, and is subject to the
same problems.
How can we reduce users’ risk of data loss in these scenarios, even if a
developer doesn’t remember to go out of their way to protect them?
Maybe changing the default profile is the wrong approach, especially since it
doesn’t cover the Nightly case. Maybe instead we need to be doing something
like automatically backing up the user’s profile every time they switch builds,
and keeping the last N backups. We’d then need to provide some extremely easy
UI in Firefox itself (and not some external tool) to restore from one of these
backups.
Possibly just even adding easy UI to Firefox itself to both backup and restore
your profile would eliminate the need for the automatic backups, although I
still vastly prefer the automatic backup idea as it reduces the need for
developers to remind users to backup their profile.
- Seth
On Apr 8, 2015, at 12:49 PM, Gavin Sharp <ga...@gavinsharp.com> wrote:
I think you can get this fairly easily by just changing one of the
values (Vendor or Name) in build/application.ini such that a different
profile folder is used.
Gavin
On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 12:28 PM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
On Wednesday 2015-04-08 12:08 -0700, Seth Fowler wrote:
I think one way we could reduce the burden on users would be to just make try
builds default to a different profile than channel builds.
Is there a simple patch one could push to change this default, and
just include on any try pushes where you need this behavior?
I'm a little nervous about making try builds differ from other
trees, since that just increases the risk of bustage (or bugs in
testing) that shows up in one place but not the other.
-David
--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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