665555 - Resources subdirectory path length too long

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 636268

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeremy Cutler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.100 Safari/534.30
Build Identifier: 

When some users attempt to install an extension built with Jetpack SDK 1.0rc2, they get the error "[EXTENSION NAME] could not be installed because Firefox cannot modify the needed file".

The longer the path length to the user's profile folder, the more likely this is to happen.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Build extension
2. Install extension on machine with long path length to user's profile folder

Actual Results:  
Extension fails to install giving the above error.

Expected Results:  
Extension should install correctly.

I have had this problem with previous versions of Jetpack, but only with my own extension data folder (I use directories within that and pathlength got too long). So I currently solve the issue by renaming the data directory from:
'jid0-#####################-missinge-data' to simply 'data'. Moving from 1.0b5 to 1.0, I've noticed that the resource directories are now:
'jid0-#####################-at-jetpack-*'
My earlier stopgap fix of renaming directories must now be applied to other subdirectories within 'resources' in order to avoid the problem some users experience.

To solve this, cfx xpi would have to generate resources with shorter pathlengths.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I think our plan of attack for this is to stop unpacking XPIs and to start generating XPIs on `cfx run`, but cc:ing Brian for confirmation.

Is there a bug on this already?

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(Not sure if this is a dupe, a dependent bug, or a standalone bug; waiting for Brian's feedback.)

Comment 3

[Brian Warner [:warner :bwarner]]

Yeah, leaving XPIs packed will fix this, by not exposing the URI components
to the filesystem at all. That's covered by bug 638742.

This particular bug is probably most directly a dupe of bug 636268, "reduce
length of generated paths".

Bug 660629 "simple XPI file layout" is vaguely related.