1252227 - Follow-ups to "Provide to other addon types a way to embed a WebExtensions addon"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect, P1)

Description

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

This issue is focused on providing to the other addon types a way to embed into their own package a WebExtension "sub-addon", and it will need to be integrated to Bug 12522215, to be able to exchange messages between the two contexts.

The goal is to provide a simple transition path which can help an add-on which was initially created using the other available add-on technologies to make use of the WebExtension API and at the same time being gradually rewritten into a WebExtension addon (at least as much as the available APIs permit to).

The should cover at least the following "transition" scenarios e.g.:

- moving the features that are already supported by the WebExtension API into the webextension part of the addon

- moving the existent data from the storages accessible to the original addon type to a storage solution which is available to the WebExtension contexts

Comment 1

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

This issue is part of the "WebExtension TransitionAPI Proposal"[1]

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18KCEIohJdQBLsHW2A9HkaZKsXhVEIhk8qvSSzU2GkzA

Comment 2

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Attachment: Bug 1252227 - [webext] Add hybrid (SDK and bootstrap) addons tests.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/56912/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/56912/

Comment 3

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Comment on attachment 8758701 [details]
Bug 1252227 - [webext] Add hybrid (SDK and bootstrap) addons tests.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/56912/diff/1-2/

Comment 4

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Patch rebased (with no changes besides resolved conflicts in the chrome.ini file)

Comment 5

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Comment on attachment 8758701 [details]
Bug 1252227 - [webext] Add hybrid (SDK and bootstrap) addons tests.

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/56912/diff/2-3/

Comment 6

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Minor update on the attached patch due to the renaming of the RDF property from "enableEmbeddedWebExtension" into "embeddedWebExtension", as it has been suggested during the presentation and the related discussion during MozLondon.

Comment 7

[Cooper Quintin]

added tracking e10s flag.
This patch is necessary for privacy badger to migrate data from sdk version to web extension version. I suggest that this patch is a blocker for further e10s rollout.

Comment 8

[Andy McKay]

Luca could you clarify what's going on with this bug please? From reading the title and comment 0 it looks like the Embedded Extension covers this, but the patch is about a test which confuses me.

Comment 9

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

(In reply to Andy McKay [:andym] from comment #8)
> Luca could you clarify what's going on with this bug please? From reading
> the title and comment 0 it looks like the Embedded Extension covers this,
> but the patch is about a test which confuses me.

My apologies, I initially attached that patch to this issue (that was mainly the issue that was tracking the bugzilla issue with the actual pathes) as an additional test case for the hybrid addons patches, initially I attached it to this issue to get an initial feedback from Andrew and Kris on its usefulness and the approach used in it (and then eventually moving it in a separate bugzilla issue).
 
Nevertheless, I'd still like to submit this test file (an reduced and updated version of it actually) for review, at least to include a test scenario which uses the new SDK loader (which is the one that any addon submitted to AMO is really going to use), mostly because I'd like to reduce any chances that the support for the "Embedded WebExtension" feature in new module loader could become broken and go unnoticed because no failures in the tests are going to happen in the test infrastructure.

Thanks Kris for updating the issue with a better summary, the previous one wasn't very helpful, given that the patches for the hybrid addons support has been landed and the only patch attached to this issue is a new test file. 

I'm moving the proposed test file into a patch attached into a separate and more specific issue (Bug 1309003), and link the new issue to this one as a dependency.

Comment 10

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Attachment #8758701 [details] marked obsolete (and its related mozreview request discarded), the patch is going to be updated and attached to Bug 1309003.

Comment 11

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

Documentation related to the "Embedded WebExtension" feature has been added to MDN:
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Embedded_WebExtensions

and examples are included in the mdn/webextensions-examples repo on github:
- https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/embedded-webextension-bootstrapped
- https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/embedded-webextension-sdk