465598 - Installing from maemo.org is hard with fennec

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[cmtalbert]

I think this is a pretty common use case for people with the n8** series phones: installing an application from the maemo.org downloads site.

1. Go to http://maemo.org/downloads/ site
2. Search for an application to install, say iphome
3. Click the little green "click to install" arrow.

= Actual =
The application is downloaded, and you get the option to save or open it.  It's not clear what to open it with, and so you pick save.  Once the download is saved, it's not clear where that just got put on your disk, so you just double click it.  Double clicking it hangs fennec.

= Expected =
We ship a mime handler so that we can recognize .install applications and offer a suitable "open with" default.

= FYI =
Browserd installs the application for you, no questions asked.  That's probably a little less security than I'm comfortable with, but it's definitely a whole lot easier than the current process with fennec.

= What to fix =
It should be pretty easy for people to install things on their phone as that's a common case with maemo hackerish users.  I think that shipping a suitable default opener for .install and .deb files will be sufficient to fix this bug.  

I'll open a separate issue if double clicking in the download manager really hangs the browser (I might have not been patient enough).

Comment 1

[cmtalbert]

Correction.  Browserd does the following:
1. Click Install
2. Select to save or open (same problem we have)
3. On save, they show the folder it's going into so you can find it again (better than we do in current fennec build).

We probably have the downloads folder somewhere in preferences, but I didn't go hunting for it.

Comment 2

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

add a case to litmus for maemo specific tests.  We really should get this in for a 1.0 release as it takes away core functionality from what browserd does.

Comment 3

[Antonio Gomes (tonikitoo)]

joel just to let you know, I am working on it on bug 455509, started yesterday, and got good progresses .. will post a WIP patch soon.

basically , it makes the OPEN option in the download dialog to work.

Comment 4

[Antonio Gomes (tonikitoo)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I think this is a pretty common use case for people with the n8** series
> phones: installing an application from the maemo.org downloads site.
> 
> 1. Go to http://maemo.org/downloads/ site
> 2. Search for an application to install, say iphome
> 3. Click the little green "click to install" arrow.
> 
> = Actual =
> The application is downloaded, and you get the option to save or open it.  It's
> not clear what to open it with, and so you pick save.  Once the download is
> saved, it's not clear where that just got put on your disk, so you just double
> click it.  Double clicking it hangs fennec.

fixed in bug 465783 : It now goes to ~/MyDocs/.documents by default, so accessible through FileManager app.

> = Expected =
> We ship a mime handler so that we can recognize .install applications and offer
> a suitable "open with" default.

fixed in bug 455509. please recheck.

> I'll open a separate issue if double clicking in the download manager really
> hangs the browser (I might have not been patient enough).

clint what the bug # for this  please?

Comment 5

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

I retested this with the fix for bug 455509 and I was unable to install stuff from a simple .install file clicked inside of fennec.

Here is what I did:
1) launch fennec
2) browser to www.maemo.org/downloads
3) click on something to download (pigden)
4) verify I get a "open with application manager" dialog and it is selected
5) click open
6) watch application manager open
7) observe error: "Operation failed"

I do this with microb, and it works just fine (verifying that the .install file is valid).

So we are actually using the correct bindings for the file type to launch application manager, we are just having issues getting it to install.  I recall an issue on Fennec a while back where we would not download a file from ftp.  This was build dependent and some ftp files would work and others would fail.  Not sure if this is causing the issues or if it is something else.

Comment 6

[Al Billings [:abillings - ex-MoCo]]

I tried this with bits from http://extindt02.indt.org/agomes/random/fennec/ (as directed) and cannot reproduce the bug. I installed pidgen with no issues on my n810.

Comment 7

[Antonio Gomes (tonikitoo)]

also working w/ April 1st nightly builds (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/) on both chinook and diablo.

just installed quite a few apps (.install's and .deb's) from fennec.

Comment 8

[Antonio Gomes (tonikitoo)]

as per IRC chat, Joel had succeed to install packages (see comment #0) : it was problem w/ his device package system (after some tweaks/hacks made by himself) that was causing the bustage.

marking as fixed.

Comment 9

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

Al and I have both verified this with builds from the build team.