Mozilla Firebird (Extensions)

[Mike Patterson]

Joe Marcus Clarke wrote on 04 Oct 2003 16:04:

> On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 17:08, Steve Peck wrote:
 >>
>>The port says this is where I should post any bugs, so here we go:-
>>
>>I get some of the extensions for Firebird, in the extension list, to install just fine.
>>from http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/
>>
>>However, the one I really want - StumbleUpon - just wont.
>>(http://www.stumbleupon.com)
>>
>>It seems to think the file permissions are wrong (for the chrome dir?). But, IMHO, they're not!
>>Firstly beause other extensions install OK, 
>>and I'm not sure chmod -R o+rw is a particularly good idea.
> 
> 
> I believe some extensions can only be installed if you're running
> Firebird as root.

Extensions that run for everybody want to go in the Firebird system 
directory.  Some extensions will install and function properly in a 
user's profile - this has the added advantage that one does not need to 
re-install the extension after one upgrades versions of Firebird.  (ie, 
the former go under /usr/whatever-it-is and the latter go under ~/.phoenix.)

Of course, many extensions have problems running under any version of 
FB/Moz other than the one that happened to be most recent when they were 
written.

I found, unfortunately, that the only way to handle extensions well was 
to either make the appropriate directories under /usr world writable, or 
as you say, to install the extensions while running FB as root.  (I 
believe I ran into problems there too, but I can't recall for sure.)

I don't think there's a good way to handle this.  :~( - ie, it's not a 
bug, it's behaviour by design.  For whatever it's worth, it's a problem 
with the Windows port as well.  (I solve that by running always with 
Administrator privileges, and not pretending that my XP box is secure.  ;) )

Mike