Re: [gnome-web-photo] Do not alter firefox settings

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Here's a reply from Wolfgang:

Le mardi 02 décembre 2008, à 15:05 +0100, Christian Persch a écrit :
> The proxy does indeed seem to be taken from GConf through other means
> in gecko 1.9 (nsUnixSystemProxySettings.cpp), so the patch looks ok to
> me. If you can confirm that with a non-suse xulrunner (e.g. ubuntu's),
> it's ok to commit the patch with a checkin comment explaining the
> issue.

Yes, that's OK for upstream xulrunner as well. The proxy settings stuff
is the same for both.

> I'm rather unsatisfied with the cited bug report though; there's no
> explanation at all how setting a pref in one xulrunner-using
> application with its own profile could affect the running instance of
> firefox et al.
> 
> As near as I could find, this is caused by a non-standard
> patch in suse's xulrunner package (mozilla-nss-shared-db.patch), but
> even then this should only affect the NSS db, not the cookies db. Also
> there's no explanation _how_ setting this specific pref causes the bug.

Yes, it's caused by a non-standard patch (gconf-backend.patch actually;
the mozilla-nss-shared-db.patch is unrelated).

This pref causes the bug because config.use_system_prefs in openSUSE
maps many more Firefox/XULRunner prefs to gconf as the upstream version
does (basically introduces lockdown functionality). This includes the
cookie behaviour and password manager prefs which are set differently by
gnome-web-photo. Those prefs get through to gconf where Firefox picks
the changes up at runtime because it thinks the user changed them.

And yes, we found that this approach is problematic in splitted
xulrunner/firefox environments but noticed that too late. It's not that
I want to blame gnome-web-photo on that one but the pref is not needed
there anyway and so it's an easier fix for _now_. The gconf-backend
modification needs more sanitizing on our side as well.

Back to Vincent mode. At least it clarifies stuff for me :-)

Thanks,

Vincent

-- 
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