firefox lost or reset all its settings???

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Montag, dem 31.10.2022 um 16:02 +0100 schrieb M. Fioretti:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 15:40:03 PM +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> > > > If so, that's terrible news. For me, at least, I hate snap with
> > > > a
> > > > passion...
> > 
> > while i do not undrestand why
> 
> in case anybody cares, see the last paragraph below (but feel
> encouraged to ignore it...). Focusing on the problem at hand...
> 
> > since you said you actually "installed over" an existing system
> > instead of doing a properly tested upgrade...
> 
> sorry, my fault here. That is not what I did. What I meant is that
> I did a complete install of 22.04, erasing the old installation, but
> without formatting or otherwise touching /home. If doing this messed
> up things, it would be a bug in the installer, not on my side, right?

well, unlike the update-manager, an installer dos not actuall know
where you come from so it will explicitly not touch anythng and leave
all data and config migration to you ... update-manage (or do-release-
upgrade on the command-line) actually know exactly what your ld system
was and what changes applications had between these two releases so if
option foo=123 in your config was changed to be called foo-bar=123 by
an upstream software change it will take this into account and migrate
your config proper ... a fresh install can simply not do this and it is
expected that when you pick that route that you know what you are doing
and will take care of this step yourself (as i said above, the easiest
is to create a fresh test user and compare the configs here)

> 
> About snap: First, it is beyond idiotic, and arrogant too, to clutter
> home directories by creating normal folder or files for package
> configuration data in plain sight, instead of hidden ones as any
> decent project has done since the 1970s. Why "$HOME/snap" and not
> "$HOME/.snap" is beyond me, really.

there is a simple technical reason, snaps run completely confined, with
only getting access through pre-defined interfaces (see: "snap
connections firefox" to list them). while firefox actually has the
"home" interface that gives you access to all your files in the home
dir auto-connected, you can at any time disconnect this interface (and
many users (particulary in enterprise environments where security
isolation is key) actualy do this ... now apps *do* expect to have
"some kind of home dir" and for this each snap has a versioned diectory
under ~/snap it can not break out from but can store files, configs,
caches etc.

the versioned nature here is becuse you can at any time run "snap
revert firefox" to go back to the former version you had on disc.

> 
> Second, everything I just wrote, times ten about the fact that AFAICT
> there is no way to change this setting, i.e. there is nothing like
> SNAPHOME="$HOME/.snapfolder" one can put in his config files.

there is work going on to allow changing this (though it is very tricky
since hiding that dir by default also means you can not easily access
your downloaded file or whatnot because you can not see the dir it was
downloaded to in this company that manages 40000 ubuntu desktops
centrally and cares for locked down apps):

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/experimental-flag-for-hiding-snap/28509

ciao
	oli
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