1231394 - Error message "Unable to add module" does not help with diagnosing the problem.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Security: UI, defect)

Description

[teythoon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.71 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Build a security module (presumably doing something wrong), try to load it into Firefox.


Actual results:

A dialog box pops open saying "Unable to add module".

I searched for people having the same issue, but unfortunately a broad range of issues are mapped to this error message, making this very tedious.  From what I've read common problems are people trying to load 32 bit objects into a 64 bit Firefox, or vice-versa, and missing dependencies.

I went on to strace my process, and can confirm that the shared object is loaded, as well as one of the libraries it depends on, but not the second one.  From the path I see that my LD_LIBRARY_PATH is honored.


Expected results:

A dialog box pops open saying *why* it was unable to add the module.

Comment 1

[Dirkjan Ochtman (:djc)]

Putting this into the Installer component as my best guess.

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

This sounds more like a support issue than a bug in Firefox, you might have more luck asking in the newsgroups or on IRC.

Comment 3

[teythoon]

Fwiw I disagree.  In the meantime I was able to build my security module (scute) in a way that Firefox could load it.  I still do not know what the issue was.

My point is that the error message is not helpful at all.

Comment 4

[drisacher]

I experience this with Firefox 47.0.1 (32-bit, Windows) and the module "p11-capi": module won't load, I don't know why.  Same module loads okay in Firefox 45.2.0.

Comment 5

[Dana Keeler (she/her) (use needinfo) (:keeler for reviews)]

There's really nothing Firefox can say that will be helpful in figuring out what's wrong with a module when it can't load it - it basically needs to be debugged by a developer.