1418835 - Spurious report of valence being outdated

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1507071

(DevTools :: General, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Eric Rescorla (:ekr)]

Attachment: image(5).png

See attached. Per :mhoye and :dcamp, valence is out of date, but it seems like it would be good if it were just silently deactivated, as its ours. Filing a bug in case some other add-on will show this later.

Comment 1

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

We have announced [1] some time ago that Valence would not be installed automatically anymore, but it looks like we could go one step further and silently remove it. Julian, is this something you can look into please? At least investigating what needs to be done here. Thanks!


[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.dev.developer-tools/valence%7Csort:date/mozilla.dev.developer-tools/HhLpLvRDqWk/_gtlshJ-BQAJ

Comment 2

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

We can add some code in DevTools to uninstall Valence if needed, but there might be another way? 
Andy, can we uninstall an addon without landing code in Firefox?

Comment 3

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

You can maybe serve a system add-on "update" (with the valence add-on ID) which simply uninstalls itself. We use this pattern often for hotfixes and one-off system add-ons. Example: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/firefox-hotfixes/rev/2655877d3168

Comment 4

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Unless Valence was originally distributed as a system add-on (which I don't think it was?), serving a system add-on with the Valence ID won't work.  Or rather, maybe it could be made to work but with a bunch of unnecessary hassle.  I don't have a profile with Valence installed to check but if Valence has an updateURL, you can just serve a regular update that does the uninstall.  You can even do it from a WebExtension:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/management/uninstallSelf

Comment 5

[Andy McKay]

What Andrew said.

Comment 6

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(In reply to Andrew Swan [:aswan] from comment #4)
> You can even do it from a WebExtension:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/management/
> uninstallSelf

Will that prompt the user to approve the "management" permission?

Comment 7

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] (PM if requests are blocking you) from comment #6)
> (In reply to Andrew Swan [:aswan] from comment #4)
> > You can even do it from a WebExtension:
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/management/
> > uninstallSelf
> 
> Will that prompt the user to approve the "management" permission?

No see the note at the top of that MDN page :)

Comment 8

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

We now remove the valence addon automatically when starting remote debugging modules.