It would be great to know how likely people are to experience this non backward-compatible change (and others like it in the future). I wonder how much telemetry we have on this. I guess not a lot, if any at all. We should probably start here, and add a probe that tracks if people connect to other targets and what versions both the toolbox and target are. For more context, this was initially discussed with digitarald, jlast and apoirot. The conclusion that we would have to break backward compatibility at some point, there's no way around it. Especially with Fission coming up. It'd be great to group non-backward compat changes together, to minimize impact on users. But Fission changes likely to break compat are further down the line and we have a debugger one now in 67. So we can't group those 2. Maybe we need an agreed process on when it's fine to break compat, and when it's not. And adjust our messaging to tell users to either install a more recent version on the target, or use an older toolbox around that.
Bug 1528219 Comment 5 Edit History
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It would be great to know how likely people are to experience this non backward-compatible change (and others like it in the future). I wonder how much telemetry we have on this. I guess not a lot, if any at all. We should probably start here, and add a probe that tracks when people attempt to connect to remote targets and what versions both the toolbox and target were. For more context, this was initially discussed with digitarald, jlast and apoirot. The conclusion was that non-backward compatible changes are inevitable. Especially with a project like Fission coming up. It'd be great to group non-backward compat changes together, to minimize impact on users. However the 2 breaking changes we're considering now (the current debugger one, and fission) are most probably not going to happen in the same release. I think we need an agreed-upon process for when it's fine to break compat, and when it's not. And adjust the messaging displayed in about:debugging/webide to tell users to either install a more recent version on the target, or use an older toolbox.