Firefox profiles broken on Darwin

[alecandido]

Nixpkgs is not distributing Firefox packages for Darwin, that's why I'm using an alternative provider
https://github.com/alecandido/nixpkgs/blob/6d2d44d113ce15a996448ca4b71ed0f7a83f5a92/flake.nix#L27

This is only providing the firefox-bin package, packaging a binary compiled and distributed by Mozilla.

However, a recent home-manager update broke the configurations supported by this package.
The issue is tracked and discussed in
nix-community/home-manager#5717

The user @booxter committed to investigate the issue, and provide a more integrated solution with PRs nix-community/home-manager#5801 and nix-community/home-manager#5808.

However, they are not yet merged, so they live as separate branches for the time being (not usable for a semi-stable configuration, since they may not receive other updates).

Temporary workaround

A workaround has been proposed already by the issue's OP, and implemented in nix-community/home-manager#5724, also not merged.

So, the current (annoying) procedure to upgrade configuration is:

1. remove profiles.ini (if not done, Nix will request it, since it would try to overwrite an externally managed one)
2. upgrade as usual
3. replace profiles.ini keeping its content as is, just removing the Version=2 line

This is just a temporary fix, and hopefully by the next upgrade better solutions will be merged into home-manager itself.

[alecandido]

The current location of profiles.ini (at the time writing) is /Users/alessandro/Library/Application Support/Firefox (not expected to change), and its content is

[InstallBBF759B29B7C1F05]
Default=Profiles/default
Locked=1

[Profile0]
Default=1
IsRelative=1
Name=default
Path=Profiles/default

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
Version=2

Actually, the Version=2 is present, since Firefox reintroduced it. The version used after the update did not include the [InstallBBF7...] section, and the Version=2 was manually deleted.