1452167 - Move about:sync into mozilla-central

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Thom Chiovoloni [:tcsc] (ex-moco)]

Currently about:sync is developed in github at https://github.com/mhammond/aboutsync. This has benefits (it's easy to add code without a lot of process overhead, like bugs) and drawbacks (the number of people who know about it outside the sync team rounds to 0).

It seems like at this point, given the fact that we need to move to a webextension soon (bug to be filed after this one), the drawbacks outweigh the benefits, and so we should move it into the product.

I believe we also need to include at least one test that fails if it's broken. Additionally, we should be confident that it doesn't get included in Firefox builds (which should be easy).

Comment 1

[Thom Chiovoloni [:tcsc] (ex-moco)]

Thinking about this a bit today and on friday (lol non-artifact builds ;_;), it seems pretty annoying to do.

The changes would be more mechanical than the changes required for e.g. bug 1452168, but there are a number of things that will suck here:

1. Vendoring all our dependencies into M-C (which includes yet another version of React...)
2. Un-JSX-ifying all our code.
3. Presumably, not using require() anymore (doesn't seem like we can reasonably use webpack...), and moving to ChromeUtils.import (or Cu.import if we can't actually use that on release yet). Probably Cu.unloading everything in shutdown also.

That's probably not the full set either. Alternatively we could dump an already-built version into m-c, but that doesn't really sound like what we want to do either.

I don't have an alternative to these things. I guess we could do bug 1452168 instead of this one (and not in addition to), but it's doubtlessly more work than just sucking it up and making these changes.