1199743 - Events for install, upgrade, enable are not run when upgrading from XUL-based add-on

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 607818

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Ben Basson]

Attachment: Install this version first

I have been looking into upgrading one of my add-ons from being XUL-based using overlays to SDK-based. 

In the SDK-based version of the add-on I want to run some code on first run (or enable), so I hooked into exports.main as per the documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Listening_for_load_and_unload

This works fine for a fresh install of the SDK-based version of the add-on, but doesn't seem to ever get called when upgrading an existing Firefox profile that has the XUL-based version installed.

This is a problem as it means there's no sensible place to hook code that initialises an add-on. The only workaround I have found so far is to listen for the "startup" load reason, i.e. a normal browser startup and then store a preference to know whether or not to run additional code. This is clearly suboptimal.

Please see sample code on GitHub at https://github.com/benbasson/firefox-addon-upgrade-test

I will attach XPIs directly to this bug.

Comment 1

[Ben Basson]

Sorry, meant to set this as UNCONFIRMED. I forgot I still had privs on here.

Comment 2

[Ben Basson]

Attachment: Install this version second

Comment 3

[Ben Basson]

I note that the Bootstrap documentation explains this away, but doesn't actually offer any real solution to the problem: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Bootstrapped_extensions#Bootstrap_data