I'm currently developing an extension for Firefox that requires the use of a sqlite database which is stored in the Firefox profile folder. While Firefox is in use the extension has to have constant access to the sqlite database to add/remove/clear entries from a few different tables. Everything seems to work fine when I'm logged in as root. However the problem occurs when I log in as a different user. Then when I open Firefox the extension doesn't seem to have access to the sqlite file in the profile folder. The odd thing is that no errors are thrown to the console so it would appear that the extension successfully finds the file it simply doesn't have read/write access to it. How can I allow all users access to the sqlite file in the Firefox profile folder?

Isn't that a design "mistake"? A FF profile folder is a "private" folder, it's user-centric: no other users should have or need access to that. If you need to make resources available globally, I mean to all users on the system, then you should 0) put it in a location that caters for that like /var/lib/something and set appropriate permissions or 1) use a type of database that avoids such problems making use of the ancient server-client paradigm. Fat chance I'm wrong, I don't know zilch about this ;-p

Well, I think I've finally found the problem. I include the sqlite database in the extension.jar file and then extract it into the profile folder when Firefox loads. For some reason on Linux systems that file is extracted as read only, however on Solaris and Windows it's extracted as read/write. When I test the extension as the root user on Linux it works fine, but when I log in as a user with restricted privileges the extension can't access the database since it's read only.

The strange thing about this is that the sqlite file attributes were never set to read only. The extension was originally developed on the Windows platform and then ported to Linux and Solaris. As a test I decided to repackage the extension on Linux and see if it was still extracted as read only. To my surprise it turns out that if I create the xpi/jar archives on Linux then it extracts as read/write, but if I create the archives on Windows then it extracts as read only in Linux. I guess I still don't understand why this is happening but at least it's working now. Does anyone have an explanation for this issue?