Using same User Profile with various users and / or LibO Versions

[Stephan Bergmann]

[putting libreoffice ML back on cc]

On 06/11/2012 05:18 PM, Rainer Bielefeld wrote:
> The facts you mentioned cause some problems for me: I often try various
> Versions to find out where the Bug appeared, some of them intended with
> the same profile to unify test conditions. I do not believe that it will
> be a hard restriction to use all versions with their own profile, but
> you never know ...

In practice, this will likely work just fine most of the time, I assume.

> An other problem I see if someone decides to downgrade. Do we have to
> recommend to do a backup of the existing User Profile before an update
> because there might be problems after the downgrade?

* If users do not force the user profile to a non-default location, LO 
should largely be able to handle a downgrade just fine.

** If the relevant versions use different default user profile 
locations, nothing bad can happen.  (Just note that once a given user 
profile has been marked as migrated, it will not be used for migration 
again.  So any changes the user makes to the downgraded version's user 
profile will be "lost" should the user later upgrade again.)

** If the relevant versions use the same default user profile location, 
there *is* a chance that data stored there has changed in a 
forward-compatible but not backward-compatible way.  (I doubt anybody 
takes care to prevent that; or am I mistaken?)  In such a case, it might 
indeed be advisable to make a backup prior to downgrade.

* If a user explicitly forces the user profile to a non-default location 
and reuses it across the downgrade, then chances are things will not 
work as intended, and it is definitely advisable to make a backup (and 
even more advisable to not reuse in the first place).

Stephan