1293414 - allow system add-ons to (optionally) survive application update

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect, P4)

Description

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

Firefox updates currently reset the updated set of system add-ons when an application update + restart happens.

I think this is a fine default, but in some cases we want to allow the updated system add-on to survive the application update - this is mostly relevant in situations where we are serving updates to old versions of Firefox that are still active in the wild.

For example, e10srollout is targeted at 48.0 and 48.0.1, both of which have already shipped. When 48.0 updates to 48.0.1, it will reset to an older version of the system update than we'd like (it will receive an update after not too long, but would be good to avoid this state in some cases.)

Comment 1

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

I'm not convinced we should do this. The solution so far has been to always reset the "features" dir in the profile on upgrade, and revert to the built-in location.

So for the situation in comment 0 that means e10srollout would send an update to 48.0 which is then uplifted to 48.0.1 - although this is kind of a hassle, I think it keeps clients in the wild more consistent.

If we have a solid use case that we can't satisfy with the above let's reopen.