250847 - problems with -install-global-extension on linux/solaris

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[David]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040706 Firefox/0.9.1
Build Identifier: 

-install-global-extension doesn't seem to work on Linux.  No output is given,
and the extension is not installed.  It works on WinXP.

I've tested Firefox 0.9.1 and Thunderbird 0.7.1 on Linux, and Thunderbird 0.7.2
on WinXP.  I used the ImageZoom and Enigmail extensions for testing.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. untar firefox into /tmp
2. launch firefox, and exit (ensures that the extensions directory gets created)
3. run /tmp/firefox/firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi

Comment 1

[Thomas]

I can confirm for Solaris 8/Sparc that -install-global-extension shows odd
behaviour, too:

firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi

will not do anything, but

firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi ANYTHING

will work (with ANYTHING being any odd string).

All commands were executed as root.

Comment 2

[David]

> firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi ANYTHING
> will work (with ANYTHING being any odd string).
Nice catch.

There is another problem with install-global-extension/lock-item/etc. - they
require X to function.  It should be possible to use these commands in
(rpm/dpkg) installation scripts without requiring X.  (ie. how -register is handled)

Comment 3

[Hiro]

There was no problem with the Mac version(0.9.1).
But, it reproduced with the Windows version(0.9.2).

Mac OS X 10.3.4
Windows XP Pro SP1

Comment 4

[Joe Christy]

I have spent *hours* wrestling with this problem, both in 3rd party packaged
versions and with official mozilla installer, for both Firefox and Thunderbird,
even going so far as to reproduce it with a virgin linux FC2 install. It should
be absolutely trivial to confirm.

Further, poking around in bugzilla, this smells an awful lot to me like older
bugs 14923 and 16599, dating to 1999 and 2000 respectively. The only thing that
has changed over the last 5 years is that the mozilla environment has evolved to
the point where there are no longer and viable wor-arounds. This is extensively
documented as bugzilla.fedora.us bug 1765, among several downstream linux
packaging bugzillas.

The net impact of this bug is that, in order to benefit from extensions: 1)
mozilla apps have to be installed individually for each user in a multi-user
*nix environment, wasting vast amounts of space and 2) certain extensions, e.g
enigmime + enigmail (which require elevated privileges to install and for crypto
function properly) simply cannot be installed at all.

In other words, Firefox/Thunderbird extensions are *BADLY* *BROKEN* and
Firefox/Thunderbird have a _HUGE_ _FOOTPRINT_ under unix/linux. Can we please
confirm this, assign it a priority and have someone who understands the code
base take action on this?!?!

Comment 5

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

Attachment: Fix the path to the XPI file before passing it to nsILocalFile

Comment 6

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

The problem is that all arguments that being with a '/' are made into a file://
URL by the nsCmdLineService::ProcessURLArg() method.  However,
nsILocalFile::InitWithPath() foesn't understand file:// URLs.  It expects a
native fully-qualified path.

The attached patch to nsExtensionManager.js.in corrects the problem by stripping
off any leading "file://" from the aPath argument passed by
install-global-{extension,theme}.  I'm not sure this is the fix you'll want to
go with, but this is what I added to the FreeBSD port, and works with Tunderbird
and Firefox.

Comment 7

[timeless]

Comment on attachment 154501 [details] [diff] [review]
Fix the path to the XPI file before passing it to nsILocalFile

this is not the way to do it. use @mozilla.org/network/io-service

Comment 8

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

Attachment: Another fix for the file:// problem

Something along the lines of this patch then?

Comment 9

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

I'm told by the current Fedora maintainer of Firefox that this prevents proper
packaging.  Can we get this considered for 1.0?

Comment 10

[chris hofmann]

yes, let's try to address in before 1.0 ships.  bryner/vlad, can you help?

Comment 11

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

*** Bug 257778 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Michal Szymanski]

I confirm the Thomas' comment (#1) for Linux Fedora Core 2, FF 1.0PR:

firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi ANYTHING
will work (with ANYTHING being any odd string).

Without this ANYTHING, however, i.e.:
firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/extension.xpi

it behaves very nasty: it starts to recursively create
/firefox_path/extension/temp directories containing a copy of the whole firefox
install directory, then another copy in extension/temp of that temporary
directory and so on. The process stopped by itself (probably by making some path
too long to process) on my machine after about 5 minutes of making really HEAVY
load. It then took about a minute to rm -rf firefox/extensions/temp :(

Strange bug!

Comment 13

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

I don't really like the fix here because we only end up with a url at all by
accident.  The real problem is that nsCommandLineService believes the last
argument is a file to open in the browser instead of an argument to the
command-line switch.  This is because it has no knowledge of the actual command
line handlers and whether they are expecting an argument or not.

However, that's risky to fix at this stage, and the capability to handle URLs
may be useful.  But, I think the patch as-is will break the case where the
argument is _not_ a url, such as when it's a relative path or a windows path. 
So it needs to test whether the argument parses as a URI:

try {
  var uri = ioServ.newURI(aPath, null, null);
  aPath = uri.path;
} catch (e) {}

Comment 14

[Brian Ryner (not reading)]

Comment on attachment 155328 [details] [diff] [review]
Another fix for the file:// problem

minusing per previous comments

Comment 15

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Attachment: patch

#ifdef XP_UNIX since there doesn't appear to be a problem with windows and I
don't want to tempt fate...

Comment 16

[Kenneth Tanzer]

From what I can tell, to install an extension, you're supposed to do the
following as root:  firefox -install-global-extension <extension filename>

When I try this, I get an error message:

[root@desktop2 firefox-1.0]# firefox -install-global-extension /tmp/hbar-0_1.xpi

*** loading the extensions datasource
*** nsExtensionManager::_finishOperations - failure, catching exception so
finalize window can close [Exception... "Component returned failure code:
0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIZipReader.open]"  nsresult: "0x80520012
(NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)"  location: "JS frame ::
file:///usr/lib/firefox-1.0/components/nsExtensionManager.js ::
nsExtensionInstaller__installExtensionFiles :: line 979"  data: no]

I tried this with two different extensions that both install fine for a single
user (homeland security status and image zoom), so I don't think it's a problem
with the extensions.  This is a Mandrake 9.2 machine.

Help!  Will be happy to provide more info or help with troubleshooting.

Comment 17

[Tim Ryan]

I'm still having exactly this problem with firefox 1.0.2. I look through the bug
reports and this same thing keeps getting reported over and over again, but the
bugs get closed with what seem to be excuses, never a real fix. There is
currently a bug report, 266615, that was changed to say no error from
incompatable extension, but it is still the same problem. I've been trying since
Firefox .9 to get a global extension to install, MozEx, that I only need because
Firefox doesn't handle Telnet, with no luck. I support 100 PCs with Linux, with
about 70 users in a test environment, so that they constantly move betweens the
PCs. I cannot deploy Forefox since telnet links don't work and I can't figure
out any way to get it to work. Oh, MozEx installs just fine if I simply load the
file from the open file menu, but of course that only does it for the
individual. I don't care if I have to manually copy and change files, just give
me a way to get this installed, or at least a way to get telnet links to work.