22463 - Plugins directory installed: need to make final decision whether or not to do this for beta and final ship

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Installer, defect, P3)

Description

[Grace Bush]

Plugins directory should not be installed for beta

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

See 21943 which tells us we *must* create a plugins folder.

Comment 2

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Why would we not create a plugins directory for beta? Please explain the
motivation behind this plan--I'm clueless.

My take: for beta, we should create a plugins directory into which Nav5.x
plug-in binaries can be installed, and the plugin search code should check first
this Mozilla plugins directory, then if not found, go on to check the Nav4.x
plugins directory.

But we will defer a final decision on that "search Nav4.x directory or not"
question until closer to beta after we've
seen how many Nav4.x plug-in binaries actually work, backward compatibly, in
Mozilla. Moving to M14.

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Apparently if we do not create the plugins directory mozilla looks for a
communicator installation and uses *that* plugin directory, thus enabling all
the plugins the user has already collected.  Someone (we thought it was
marketing!) told us this was what we should do.

This is a bad way to solve this problem. Either installation/migration should
give the user the option of copying old plugins over, or plugins should support
a pref that points at a different plugins directory or a set of directories.

We're perfectly happy to create the plugins directory -- this is what we were
*first* told to do (so people would know where to put them), and then we were
told to stop with this bug.

Comment 4

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Here's the deal: Andrei is going to change the search logic.

Before: it looked in Nav5 plugins directory *only* if it existed; if there was
no Nav5 plugins directory, it looked in Nav4 plugins directory.

From M13: it will look *first* in a Nav5 plugins directory if it exists, *then*
in a Nav4 plugins directory if there's no Nav5 plugins directory or if the
needed plugin is not found in the Nav5 plugins directory.

The reason I asked you to not create the plugins directory for M12 was that with
the old "Before" logic, creating this caused all plugins to seem to "break" in
M12 where they worked before. But after Andrei's made the search logic change,
we'll no longer have that harmful side effect.  Hence we go ahead with creating
the Nav5 plugins directory from M13 (with the new search logic) but not in M12
(with the old search logic).

That will be our interim solution, and then depending on how many plugins work
unchanged in Nav5, we'll make a final decision about behavior for the final
release. Thanks!

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

The final resolution is we must always create the Plugins directory, whether we
install any plugins or not.

Comment 6

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

OK: the decision for beta is that we install the plugins directory, and that's
been done, so I'm closing this bug. I've opened a separate reminder bug on
myself, #23856, that we must make a final decision about what we do for FCS
based on the number of plug-ins that run with backward compatibility.

Comment 7

[Grace Bush]

build 2000011309