1457270 - Thunderbird 60b4 does not detect new extensions in profile extensions directory

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Lorenz Froihofer]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

While working on the port of XNote++ for Thunderbird 60, I found out that Thunderbird 60b4 does not detect new extensions that are placed into the extensions directory within the Thunderbird profile. I deinstalled XNote++ from the Add-ons manager within thunderbird, shut down Thunderbird, copied the XNote++ sources again to the extenions directory, but Thunderbird did not install it upon startup.


Actual results:

None of the two approaches mentioned at the following page worked: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Thunderbird_extensions/Building_a_Thunderbird_extension_7:_Installation


Expected results:

Retried the same procedure with TB 52.7.0 and it worked as expected. This means that somewhere between the code for TB 52.7.0 and TB 64b4 this functionality was broken. The current workaround for me is to use TB 52.7.0 for registering XNote++ again and continue to work with TB 60b4 after XNote has been registered again correctly.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Lorenz Froihofer from comment #0)
> ... copied
> the XNote++ sources again to the extenions directory, but Thunderbird did
> not install it upon startup.
That's not the documented way of installing an add-on.

Side-loading doesn't work any more, see bug 1389189, bug 1436483 or bug 1389741.

Oh, maybe it's due to the fact that "unpacked" add-ons don't work any more, only in XPI form. Bug 1444502.

Sorry, we won't fix that.

Comment 2

[Lorenz Froihofer]

> That's not the documented way of installing an add-on.

Well, add-on installation this way is one of the possibilities documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Thunderbird_extensions/Building_a_Thunderbird_extension_7:_Installation

If these things are no longer supported (both described options don't work), I would kindly ask someone with knowledge and permissions to update this part of the add-on development documentation to reflect the latest changes - thanks.