1660182 - Prevent devtools/shared & devtools/server modules from reading firefox specific prefs

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, task, P3)

Description

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

Modules from devtools/shared and devtools/server should never attempt to read preferences defined in browser/app/profile/firefox.js because those preferences will not be set in mobile (Fenix).

To address this we could introduce a module (devtools-shared-preferences?) to read and write prefs from devtools/shared and devtools/server and lint against a direct usage of Services.prefs APIs.

The module would contain a curated list of safe preferences, defined either in modules/libpref/init/all.js or in modules/libpref/init/StaticPrefList.yaml (roughly amounts to 70 devtools prefs right now).

We need to figure out how to handle non-devtools prefs calls. Either eslint-ignore or list some non-devtools prefs in the curated list of devtools-shared-preferences.

Ideally we would also have a similar module for client preferences, because in theory a pref should either always be read from the client or only from the server, not a mix of both. But it's a much bigger refactor, so out of scope of this initial bug.

Comment 1

[Jan Honza Odvarko [:Honza] (always need-info? me)]

Thanks for thinking about this Julian.

Honza