Shared Lightning profile across Linux and Windows

In #calendar on Mozilla IRC the past few days a user has been asking about using a shared profile on Thunderbird between Linux and Windows (“shared” meaning a dual boot system of Linux/Windows, but not at the same time, obviously). Generally this isn’t a big deal UNLESS you have a binary extension, in which case you’d have to reinstall the extension every time! That’s awfully lame.

BUT there should be a way to make a unified extension for all operating systems. In fact ssitter had written an article to do that. It needs some updating to account for the Mozilla 2 XPCOM changes, however.

The steps are mostly the same, with some added.

1. Download whatever versions you want (perhaps 1.0b4?).
2. Unzip them all and choose which one will be your “unified” version.
3. Find the <em:targetPlatform> section in the install.rdfs and include all the necessary ones.
4. Find the libcalbasecomps.* (where * is dll, dylib, so, etc. for your platform) inside the components directories.
5. Copy the libraries together into one directory.
6. Copy the lines from each components.manifest together into one manifest.
7. For some systems you’ll need to specify the ABI (and possibly change the path), note that the ABI is just what was inside the <em:targetPlatform>.
8. Rezip this up into an XPI and you should be good to go!

In my test I ended up with an XPI that was approximately 10% bigger after combining Mac (x86 and x64), Linux (x86 and x64), Win32, Solaris Sparc and Solaris x86. Why is this not done by default? Probably just cause no one has done it…there is a bug about it though. One issue that might be encountered using this method is pre-processing of some script files (as is discussed in that big) but hopefully it should “mostly” work. (Note that this is mostly untested.)

Edit: I should also mention that you would need to do something similar with the themes folders if they differ dramatically (it seems there’s just two: winstripe and pinstripe: i.e. Windows & Mac; Linux and Solaris most likely also use winstripe).