1498929 - enable mozmill add-on functionality when bootstrapped add-ons are no longer supported

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Testing Infrastructure, enhancement)

Description

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

From bug 1488813 comment 0:

"Bootstrapped code will start being removed from 65 Nightly after October 22 (completed before Dec 11).  Bootstrapped add-ons won't work in 65 Beta (on Dec 11) or 65 Release (on Jan 29th)."

In bug 1413432 comment 7 Kris writes:

"Bootstrapped extensions in their current form are going away, at least in Firefox. For a start, we're working on removing support for RDF, which means install.rdf support will have to go. I'm also planning to remove support for loading extension chrome.manifest files, for performance reasons, once system add-ons have finished migrating to Fluent.

That said, we're going to continue supporting some form of bootstrapped add-ons that are as powerful as current bootstrapped add-ons. For Firefox, that will probably mean WebExtensions with embedded experiment APIs.

For Thunderbird, I'm willing to provide hooks so that you can handle loading bootstrapped add-ons however you want, just so long as the code for dealing with bootstrap scopes and chrome manifest files lives in comm-central."


This bug is for working out how to handle this. 
(For reference, Mozmill is used for automated testing of the Thunderbird UI.)

Comment 1

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Firefox will continue to use chrome manifests for the foreseeable future, right? That is, there's no plans to replace them with something else?

Comment 2

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

(In reply to Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan) from comment #1)
> Firefox will continue to use chrome manifests for the foreseeable future,
> right? That is, there's no plans to replace them with something else?

I can't promise that. I'm planning to remove support for bootstrapped manifests as soon after bootstrap removal as I can. Beyond that, I have no immediate plans to remove chrome.manifest support, but I have tentative ideas about reducing their usage after bug 1478124, and building the existing registrations into the same static hashtable that will hold binary component registrations to reduce the need for per-process hashtable entries.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Ccing Andrew too, referring to his bug 1413432 comment 15 on MozMill and JS Bridge support going forwards.

Suggestions welcome. 

Smme of the Firefox system add-ons seem to have been just moved to a component (like Pocket), but I don't think we want that for a testing add-on. 

Perhaps convert to a WebExtension experiment like bug 1451513, where the mochitest extension was converted?

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Just for the record: bug 1413432 comment #15 is about letting us know about the relevant M-C bugs in advance.

Comment 5

[alexmehler]

ohh what a nice christmas present :( , you guys at mozilla are really outdoing yourself , respect ! instead of fixing 10 year old bugs lets remove bootstrapped so these evil hackers cant make usefull addons anymore lol

so wheres the files on dxr so i can patch it back in my own build ?

Comment 6

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

This bug isn't needed since bug 1510097 is fixed.

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Ah, this is the bug in which I expected to see some action. Alex, bootstrapped add-ons continue to work, see bug 1510097.

This bug is RESOLVED FIXED by bug 1510097.