1287191 - system add-ons should not honor "empty" Balrog response

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1292029

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

Noticed this while testing bug 1284564 (see bug 1284564 comment 2):

* if we have not applied any updates, nothing happens and this is logged:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c9a70b64f2faa264296f0cc90d68a2ee2bac6ac5/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/internal/XPIProvider.jsm#3045

* if there *have* been any updates applied, then instead all updates are removed and all default add-ons are disabled, as documented.

Osmose points out why this is happening in bug 1284564 comment 4:

Ah, that makes sense, the two empty sets match. Reading through the code again, `addonList` is `null` if the `<addons>` tag is missing, and `[]` if it is present but empty.

Comment 1

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

Unless there is an urgent need for this feature, we might want to just do bug 1272672 instead.

Comment 3

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

(In reply to Robert Helmer [:rhelmer] from comment #1)
> Unless there is an urgent need for this feature, we might want to just do
> bug 1272672 instead.

So the reason our tests didn't catch this before is that some tests weren't running due to a JS scoping bug, see bug 1291569.

I'm going to go ahead and fix this now so we can fully enable existing tests, before I start on bug 1272672.

Comment 4

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

The more I think about this, the more I think we should just remove this feature.

Right now the way an "empty" Balrog response is treated is to remove all updates, and disable all built-in add-ons. There isn't really a great way to re-enable the built-in add-ons other than to continue pushing updates.

I don't think there's really a great use case for doing this, and having it happen by accident would be pretty harmful.

We should remove this feature, and also implement bug 1273709 which will give us a way to specify that either the built-in or the updated version should be used.