1622958 - Add a way to specify environment variables on Android

Status: NEW

(Testing :: mozregression, enhancement)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

On desktop, mozregression automatically propagates environment variables to the Firefox process it invokes. For example, if I run:

$ MOZ_LOG="apz.controller:5" mozregression -B debug -P stdout --launch 2020-03-16

mozregression will launch today's debug build and it will produce logging for the "apz.controller" module at verbosity "5".

On Android there does not appear to be a way to do this. It would be nice to add one.

We may not want to enable automatic propagation of environment variables like for desktop, but there could be a flag along the lines of --setenv MOZ_LOG="apz.controller:5".

Comment 1

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Note that test harnesses like mochitest and reftest support this:

  --setenv NAME=VALUE   Sets the given variable in the application's
                        environment.

and it works on Android, so there is support for this at some layer.

Comment 2

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Looks like there is support for this in mozdevice, and the way to engage it would be to pass a moz_env parameter to the launch_activity() call.

Comment 3

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #2)

Looks like there is support for this in mozdevice, and the way to engage it would be to pass a moz_env parameter to the launch_activity() call.

I hacked a local mozregression build to pass in such a parameter, but it didn't seem to have the intended effect of activating logging. I'm not sure why.

Comment 4

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #3)

I hacked a local mozregression build to pass in such a parameter, but it didn't seem to have the intended effect of activating logging. I'm not sure why.

The issue seems to be that I was unnecessarily quoting the env var's value, which seems to mess things up (I guess mozdevice handles quoting if necessary itself). With the quotes removed, it works fine.