529795 - A better communication between Firefox developers and extension developers is needed

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Andreas Wagner [:TheOne] [use NI]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

Example: Currently there are a lof of questions in IRC about the checkCompatibility pref that does not work anymore (bug 521905).
People trying hours and wondering why this is not working anymore, just to find out that the pref changed but no one told them. (Sorry Mossops blog entry is not engough for this, and the article on MozillaZine came much too late).
Another example: Bug 528166 is about an API change that has nowhere been listed. It took me hours to trace the bug etc. In the end, _someone_ knew on bugzilla this is invalid, because the API changed.

This is just frustrating people and does not help getting happy users and developers. It costs a lot of time and power and patience.

So the general problem is: We need a real changelog! One that is more than the release notes (or the devmo pages mentioned below), but not on a bugzilla level of course (but maybe one can add links to the corresponding bugzilla entries). It must be short but _complete_. It must be published on one single resource. Someone always knows _something_. Now it's about to bring that something together to a single place where extension developers can find _everything_! And that resource must be published to developers so that they stay informed.

There is https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3.6 and https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_3.6_for_developers but they are not complete at all.

So how can we do this without forgetting something important and without overwhelming extension developers?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

As a first step, the "Firefox X.Y for developers" could link to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=FIXED%20dev-doc-needed or something like that (fixed bugs marked as needing documentation changes, that have not yet been added to the docs). The query could be tweaked to only include changes landed on the relevant branch.

Though, from my experience looking through the mozilla-central changelog when I have time, it's not rare that even the obvious cases are not marked as dev-doc-needed (because people forget or don't know they should use this keyword).

Perhaps we could use a flag (like in-testsuite) for documentation, so that the bugs default to "not known if it needs documentation" and interested parties can go through the new FIXED bugs and change the flag one way or the other.

CCing blizzard, who should be interested in this.

Comment 2

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

The problem in this case was my query that I use for pulling up a list of bugs that need documenting was specifically excluding bugs marked INVALID, so I never saw this one. I've fixed my query, and suddenly I have 10 more bugs than I previously did that need documenting.

I'm still training the developers to remember to tag bugs dev-doc-needed; they're actually getting pretty good at it.

Comment 3

[Andreas Wagner [:TheOne] [use NI]]

Sheppy, I didn't (and don't) want to blame you or anyone else here. Nobody's perfect, including myself.

My intention is to optimize the relation between firefox team and extension developers. And I think a good start is to improve communication between each other.

I still vote for such a single but complete changelog which is more than release notes or that two pages on devmo (why are there even two?), bot not just a list of fixed bugs from Bugzilla.

This page doesn't need to be beautiful. Maybe the devs theirselfes can take the time to immediately add their changes when the patch that changes API etc. has been accepted, instead of using bugzilla queries over bugs from a long time ago.

But extension developers really need this. Extension support is one of the few features that make Firefox unique. Frustrated developers are lost over time. And then, they are lost forever.

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What two pages on devmo are you talking about?

Comment 5

[Andreas Wagner [:TheOne] [use NI]]

There is https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3.6
and https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_3.6_for_developers

Comment 6

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Those articles serve different purposes.

"Firefox 3.6 for developers" is intended to be an "everything interesting that's new" article.

"Updating extensions for Firefox 3.6" is a guide to the steps that need to be taken to get existing extensions to work on Firefox 3.6.

Both are works in progress; the "Updating" article in particular isn't as useful as it needs to be yet.

Comment 7

[Brian King [:kinger]]

The best place to communicate things like this is in the AMO developer hub:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers

Comment 8

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

We now publish add-on compatibility reports in the add-ons blog, which are also featured in the dev hub. They link to the MDN page for additional info.

We also have better communication with Firefox devs, who know they should flag add-on compat issues with the addon-compat keyword. A compat change slips through every now and then, which is pretty much unavoidable, but I think we're doing a pretty good job at this now.

I'm closing this as Fixed, but please reopen if something is missing.