SeaMonkey:Moving Profiles from mozilla.org to Mozilla

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Change of Profile Location

The vendor ID of SeaMonkey trunk builds was recently changed from mozilla.org to Mozilla (see bug 393620). This affects the location of the profiles. Due to that, SeaMonkey is now searching for the profiles in the following locations:

Profile Locations
Operating System New location Old location
Unix ~/.mozilla/seamonkey/<ProfileName> ~/.mozilla.org/seamonkey/<ProfileName>
Windows %APPDATA%\Mozilla\SeaMonkey\Profiles\<ProfileName>\  %APPDATA%\mozilla.org\SeaMonkey\Profiles\<ProfileName>\
Mac OS X (profile location is not be affected by the change!) ~/Library/Application Support/SeaMonkey/Profiles/<ProfileName>/
OS/2 %MOZILLA_HOME%\Mozilla\SeaMonkey\Profiles\<ProfileName>\  %MOZILLA_HOME%\mozilla.org\SeaMonkey\Profiles\<ProfileName>\

Making the change

What to copy

This means that if you have used a suiterunner trunk build older than 2007-09-29 and then upgrade to a new one, the new trunk build will not see your profile. To avoid this, you need to copy the profile directory (or directories, for multiple profiles) from the old to the new location, before starting a nightly build that has the change. In addition, you need to copy the file profiles.ini that is located in the same directory as the different profiles.

Which files to edit

In order to use the copied profiles, you need to edit the following files in each of the profiles:

  • prefs.js
  • user.js (if present)
  • extensions.ini

In these files, you need to adapt the paths to reflect the new location. Take care to only change those instances of mozilla.org in those files that are related to a path on the local system!

The file

  • secmod.db

also contains the profile path, but it should not be necessary to edit this file. Note: it might be destructive to edit this binary file in a normal editor!

Files to remove

You should also remove the files

  • XUL.mfasl
  • XPC.mfasl
  • panacea.dat
  • xpti.dat
  • compreg.dat

from each profile directory. These files are caches that contain the profile path but are automatically rebuilt when restarting SeaMonkey, so nothing is lost.

Automating the change

For Unix systems, there is a shell script to automatically copy the profiles from the old to the new location and edit and remove the above files. You need to call it from a terminal using

pmigrate.sh <ProfileName>

So this needs to be done once for each profile.

Further notes

  • If something doesn't work after this change, please describe the problem in the newsgroup mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey.
  • If you either need to test older builds with the relocated profile or want to temporarily keep the old location, look for application.ini in your SeaMonkey install directory and change the Vendor= line accordingly (should be set to Vendor=Mozilla by default in the new builds, was Vendor=mozilla.org in the older builds).
  • You should only remove the old profile location if you are certain that you will never run an old nightly build again.