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I have mixed feelings on the whole "multiple profile support" in
Mozilla. I think we can learn what worked and what didn't from Mozilla.
While I support abstraction of the "profile directory" and the use of a
random seed to store prefs, I don't think we should be using Mozilla's
mechanism as it is. Here's my take: - the ability to direct your application to a different "profile" directory really is a big win - it makes testing easier, it allows add-on products to do stuff like store your "profile" on USB keys, etc. (see http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2005-01-07.html to see where trends in this area may go) - actually letting the product manage these multiple profile directories was a real pain, and benefited nobody but hackers/power users and QA. Mozilla developed a whole UI for selecting a profile at startup, creating and deleting profiles, etc. We had a lot of bugs and it was a lot of extra code to maintain for a feature used by so few people. I'm guessing less than 0.1% of Mozilla/Firefox users actually use the feature. I know I'm late to the game on this one but IMHO, profile management should be limited to a command line parameter as described on the Wiki, and we should not try to do "profile management." The fallout of this is that we can/should get rid of the extra two levels of redirection "Profile/<profilename>" and just use the random seed. i.e. ~/.chandler/lk8sffkis.rep/ or C:\D&S\alecf\App. Data\OSAF\Chandler\lk8sffkis.rep I agree with John that if the repository is where we (want to) store everything, then we should call it the "repository directory", and try very hard not to store anything else there. --repository-directory=path/to/dir seems fine to me. (That said, I think that it will be inevitable that we store non-repository files there given our healthy use of 3rd-party libraries!) Alec John Anderson wrote: I think profile directory, makes sense in the context of a user's profile, e.g. preferences, etc. -- as in Mozilla. However, Chandler is a very different beast, and one of its principle hallmarks is the idea that everything is kept in a single large repository (even preferences could be stored there). So using the Mozilla terminology doesn't seem to make much sense. I'm not that attached to repository directory, but I think we need a better name than profile directory. Do you have any other suggestions? |
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