1436483 - Addon hooked into Thunderbird via "directory redirect file" is no longer reloaded after restart

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1389741

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 Edge/16.16299

Steps to reproduce:

My development environment is as follows: 

All source files of the my (legacy, XUL overlay, non-bootstrap) AddOn reside (unpacked) in a folder (C:\Users\John\Documents\GitHub\TbSync\) and in the extensions folder of my Thunderbird profile I have a file called "[e-mail]" (which is the ID of my AddOn, same as in install.rdf) which contains just one line: the path to my development folder (C:\Users\John\Documents\GitHub\TbSync\)

This installed my AddOn in Thunderbird and when I made changes to the so source , I just had to restart Thunderbird and the changes where adapted. This was the recomendet development environment a couple of years ago, cannot find the page explaining this anymore.

This worked fine until TB52. In TB58 (beta) or TB60 (daily), this does not work anymore. Even after restarting the computer, changes in the source are not adapted.

I tried -purgecache, but that did not help.

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As a side note: Starting TB52 using the profile used by TB60, the addon gets reloaded/refreshed and next time TB60 is started it uses the current sources as well.



Actual results:

After restarting Thunderbird, AddOn is not using the current sources, but the ones of the initial install. 


Expected results:

After restarting Thunderbird, the current sources should be used.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This is covered by bug 410474

Comment 2

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

I cannot see how this bug is related to bug 410474. Typo?

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

What you describe here is a duplicate of bug 1389189. Sadly Mozilla core removed this facility

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Oops, maybe duplicated to the wrong bug. That proxy feature is removed permanently.

Comment 5

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

So this is indeed a "we like you as AddOn developers and stuff, but developing AddOns is now just a big pile of ****" ? Or is there any other way to develop legacy Addons without having to pack, uninstall and install an XPI file each time you made a change?

What should I do now?

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Please note that the Thunderbird team and the Thunderbird add-on developers are in the same boat: Mozilla core is changing and things stop working for add-on developers and for Thunderbird.

When I test my add-on, I indeed pack (Winzip, a few clicks) and re-install, no need to uninstall. Then restart. Clumsy, I know.

Comment 7

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

I know, the entire Situation is just so sad.

I wish Thunderbird could simply fork the current mozilla code base and would stop taking all those changes it does not like. I mean, at some point you will have to drop XUL completely because Firefox is killing it, right? But there is no replacement for us AddOn developers, webExtension will not do... That is going to be a very sad day.

Comment 8

[klaus]

This works if TB is restarted twice. See this
 dublicate Bug.

Comment 9

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

This issue is resolved for me.

Jork explained the code changes and if you automate the "build" process of your XPI it is not taking longer to install the new version over the old one (no need to uninstall) than it needs to restart Thunderbird. With bootstrapped extensions, you do not need to restart TB at all to see the changes.

There is a cache issue, which might needs manual flushing. I do that by calling this at the end of uninstall in my bootstrap.js:

Services.obs.notifyObservers(null, "chrome-flush-caches", null);

Comment 10

[klaus]

that sideloading  is gone is truely bad.

As soon as my extension breaks the display of tabs, there seems no way to get rid of the extension: corrected code is not loaded, the tab where I could uninstall the addon is not displayed. Also, I cannot install the new code because the addon tab is gone. (all tabs are gone - I put an alert into onTabOpened which breaks the code, and now I am stuck with a TB without tabs.)

So I am stuck with a TB 60 which sticks to the broken addon. Is there any way to get rid of it?

Comment 11

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Just delete the add-on from the profile's extensions folder?