663052 - Compatibility information not working reliably

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Ingo Müller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: 

The check of online compatibility information doesn't seem to work very reliably. When an addon, which is not compatible with the current version of the application according to its install.rdf , but has updated compatibility information set through the AMO developer hub, the addon should install. When the information cannot be retrieved, it doesn't, and common users don't understand why.


I am an add-on developer, and I get several complaints per week from people who can't install my add-on (ThunderBirthDay, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/5337) because it's supposedly not compatible with the latest Thunderbird version. Of course it is, and of course AMO has that information. I have to tell each and every one of them to restart Thunderbird and try again. Doing this several times per week and on a per user basis is a waste of time.

I tried to update install.rdf, but my new version got rejected, as no other change was introduced other that the compatibility information. The reviewer told me to set the information on AMO instead. Do I really have to submit a fake update where I change a few comments and syntax in order to solve this problem??

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

It's not clear if you're proposing a client solution or a server solution. I agree that AMO rejecting an update and only relying on the server-side version updates is not ideal. Ideally AMO would just rewrite the extension with the new version data. On the client side, I'm not sure there's a lot we can do to make it clearer that the version check failed to complete, rather than that it did complete and it's not actually compatible.

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Can you enable extensions.logging.enabled and get a copy of the logging in the error console for cases when installing your extension fails?

Comment 3

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

I don't see any recent rejections for your add-on. We normally don't reject based on that, we just approve and add a note indicating that you can do this on AMO instead. If you upload a version with updated compat information I can approve it quickly.

Comment 4

[Ingo Müller]

@Benjamin: I am not sure what I am proposing, I am primarily raising the issue. But a server side solution is something I have thought about as well (without knowing anything about how things work at the moment): couldn't the server unpack the XPI, update install.rdf and repack the XPI when a developer modifies compatability information? Maybe this would create a new version, which would be automatically approved. Like this, new downloads would work just as usual. If no new version would be created, there would be different XPIs for the same version out there... which is maybe not ideal, as it breaks hashes, signatures, ...

@Dave: I can't reproduce the error, I just get bugged by people who fail to install their XPIs...

@Jorge: Thanks for offering your help, I'll submit a new version shortly!

Comment 5

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> @Dave: I can't reproduce the error, I just get bugged by people who fail to
> install their XPIs...

Could you ask those people for supplying us the requested information?

Comment 6

[Ingo Müller]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > @Dave: I can't reproduce the error, I just get bugged by people who fail to
> > install their XPIs...
> 
> Could you ask those people for supplying us the requested information?

I know that some people just blocked Thunderbird with their Personal Firewall. I will ask in the future for detailed error logs, but as I updated my install.rdf, my add-on doesn't depend on the compatibility information from the internet anymore.

Comment 7

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

If they blocked thunderbird from accessing AMO for the updated compatibility information then yes remote compatibility updates won't work. The only way around this would be as you say to have AMO manually change install.rdf in the extensions whenever a compatibility change is requested. Of course if they have firewalled Thunderbird then they won't be getting Firefox or add-on updates either.

Comment 8

[Ian Nartowicz]

A similar issue occurs in some situations where a profile is copied to a different location, or otherwise causes the extensions to be revalidated.  Extensions which were installed using server-side version information are now marked as incompatible because of the install.rdf version.

Different bug?

Comment 9

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> A similar issue occurs in some situations where a profile is copied to a
> different location, or otherwise causes the extensions to be revalidated. 
> Extensions which were installed using server-side version information are
> now marked as incompatible because of the install.rdf version.
> 
> Different bug?

Different issue. May already be fixed in a coming release of Firefox if the file modification times of the extension's files weren't changed, but if they were then the only way to fix this would be to delay startup until we get a response from the update server, something I don't think we're going to do.

Comment 10

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Dave, isn't that bug 655254 which we have fixed recently for Firefox 7?

Comment 11

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Dave, isn't that bug 655254 which we have fixed recently for Firefox 7?

yes

Comment 12

[Mihai Morar, (:MihaiMorar)]

I confirm ThunderBirthDay 0.8.0 is compatible, got installed and works as expected on my Thunderbird 17.0.7

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/thunderbirthday/