I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and variolus approaches on allowing profile sharing among Mozilla thoughts. I thought you might find it helpful to hear at least one user's perspective on profile sharing. The particular problem I've been trying to resolve lately is sharing a Thunderbird profile and directory among Windows hosts and soon a Linux (Fedora) host. I've spent the better part of 2-2 1/2 days googling, reading, trying different things and being pretty frustrated with the thing as it is now. After finally finding a couple of articles that covered it, I'm giving it another try. However, this is yet another example of Open Source programs that require near-rocket science to do what is very simple in Proprietary products; in this case MS Outlook. The practice of allowing hard-coded directory locations reside in key Thunderbird profile components is, to me, a large part of the problem. In 30 years of computing, I long ago learned hard-coding anything like host names, file names, or directory names is a very poor approach which only requires being fixed in the future.
If I may, I am pleading with you guys to please, please consider the common Joe-blow user who barely knows how to spell Thunderbird let alone know hot ro edit prefs.js and the like. While these things are not a problem for me, I see this as a BIG impediment to both home users with multiple machines as well as companies trying to use TB as their primary mail pgm. Simply put, please get rid of the hard-coded entries and get the profiles to the point where the user only need point TB to the correct directory. Certainly, I understand this may require major redesign. You might as well fix it now rather than later. Thanks for at least letting me post.
Regards, George Lunsford