Let a machine say what it is for, and give Firefox its face back

Phase 4: the optional application categories, and the Firefox chrome.

Everything Panama installed until now was what every machine gets, which meant a
work laptop acquired emulators and a desktop that wanted Steam had to be told
about it by hand. The interview now offers the categories in
setup/packages/extras/ as a checklist -- gaming, creative, communication,
virtualization -- and nothing is preselected, because a default here installs
applications nobody chose on a machine whose owner answered a question they
thought was about something else.

A category is one file, and a category mixes both package managers because the
applications do: Steam is in RPM Fusion, Slack publishes only a flatpak. So a
bare line is a dnf package and a flatpak: line is a Flathub ID, and one file
holds the whole answer rather than splitting each category across two. The menu
is read from the directory rather than written down, so adding a category is
adding a file. Every name in all four was resolved against the actual
repositories before being written down, and the contract re-resolves them --
the point of admitting applications one at a time is that they stay installable,
and a typo here fails on somebody else's machine, not this one.

Firefox is declared, and its chrome is Edge-Frfox, vendored into config/firefox.
sunhat carried that theme with no license and no attribution; it is MIT, and now
it says so and says whose it is.

It is the only piece of Panama's configuration that does not go to a path this
repository chooses. Firefox owns the profile directory, names it with a random
salt, and does not create one until the browser has been run -- so link-dotfiles
finds or creates a profile and links both halves into it. Both, or neither works:
chrome/ is the CSS and user.js sets the preference that makes Firefox read chrome/
at all, without which the theme is a directory of dead files.

Two assumptions there were wrong, and the contract exists for both. Firefox has
moved to the XDG directories -- the profile root is ~/.config/mozilla/firefox on
this build, not ~/.mozilla/firefox, and writing to the wrong one themes nothing
and says nothing about it. And -CreateProfile turns out to be non-interactive, so
a fresh machine gets the theme on the first install rather than the second. The
contract runs link-dotfiles for real against a throwaway home with no profile in
it and looks at what came out; it was checked by pointing the search at the
legacy path only and watching it fail.

Also: the enrolment/enrollment spellings from the last commit are corrected. This
repository is US-spelled everywhere else -- color 1131 times against colour never
-- and consistency in prose is worth as much as it is in code.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NvgBuSWB5sE43yWmg21ozj
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-20 21:24:15 -04:00
parent b319d1a5e1
commit 88497826ec
168 changed files with 6293 additions and 32 deletions
+64
View File
@@ -288,6 +288,70 @@ if [ -d "$PANAMA_WALLPAPER_DIR" ]; then
done
fi
# The Firefox chrome. Edge-Frfox, vendored in config/firefox -- see the README
# there for what it is and whose it is. Both halves have to land or neither
# works: chrome/ holds the CSS, and user.js sets the preference that makes
# Firefox read chrome/ at all.
#
# Firefox has moved to the XDG directories, so a current build keeps profiles in
# ~/.config/mozilla/firefox and an older one in ~/.mozilla/firefox. Both are
# looked for rather than assumed -- assuming picked the wrong one on the machine
# this was written on.
PANAMA_FIREFOX_DIR="$PANAMA_PATH/config/firefox"
firefox_root=""
find_firefox_root() {
local candidate
for candidate in "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/mozilla/firefox" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox"; do
if [ -f "$candidate/profiles.ini" ]; then
firefox_root="$candidate"
return 0
fi
done
return 1
}
if [ -d "$PANAMA_FIREFOX_DIR" ] && command -v firefox >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo -e "\n--- Setting up Firefox chrome ---"
# A profile does not exist until Firefox has been run once. -CreateProfile is
# a documented flag that creates one and exits rather than opening a window,
# so a fresh machine gets the theme on the first install instead of the
# second. MOZ_HEADLESS in case a future build decides otherwise.
if ! find_firefox_root; then
log "No Firefox profile yet; creating one"
MOZ_HEADLESS=1 firefox -CreateProfile panama >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
find_firefox_root || true
fi
if [ -z "$firefox_root" ]; then
log "Could not find or create a Firefox profile; skipping the chrome"
else
# Every profile, not just the default. profiles.ini records each one as a
# path that is relative to the root unless it says otherwise.
while read -r profile; do
[ -n "$profile" ] || continue
[ -d "$profile" ] || continue
for piece in chrome user.js; do
target="$profile/$piece"
if [ -L "$target" ]; then
rm "$target"
elif [ -e "$target" ]; then
backup="$PANAMA_OLD/firefox-$(basename "$profile")-$piece"
mv "$target" "$backup"
log "Moved existing $target to $backup"
fi
ln -s "$PANAMA_FIREFOX_DIR/$piece" "$target"
log "Linked $PANAMA_FIREFOX_DIR/$piece → $target"
done
done < <(awk -F= -v root="$firefox_root" '
/^\[/ { relative = 1; next }
/^IsRelative=/ { relative = $2; next }
/^Path=/ { print (relative == 1 ? root "/" $2 : $2) }
' "$firefox_root/profiles.ini")
fi
fi
PANAMA_APPLICATION_DIR="$PANAMA_PATH/config/local/share/applications"
USER_APPLICATION_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/applications"
mkdir -p "$USER_APPLICATION_DIR"