668159 - Installing extensions from the command line using the extensions folder broken

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Add-Ons: General, defect)

Description

[alex]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.803.0 Safari/535.1

Steps to reproduce:

1. On OS X 10.6.8 copy an extension xpi file (e.g. "enigmail-1.2-sm-mac.xpi") to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxx.default/extensions/
2. Start Thunderbird 5



Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

Analog to Thunderbird 3 the user should be asked to install the extension.
Also see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_extensions ("Global Installation"). This doesn't work either. I could not find any documentation about this changed behavior or on on how to install an extension on Thunderbird 5 using the command line.

Comment 1

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

What happens if you delete the extensions.* files first?

Comment 2

[alex]

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, deleting these file doesn't help (tested it before):

cd ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/cxrqfra5.default;\
rm -rf extensions*;\
mkdir extensions;\
cp /tmp/enigmail5/enigmail-1.2-sm-mac.xpi extensions;\
open /Applications/Thunderbird\ 5.app

Comment 3

[alex]

Joshua, can you confirm that this is a bug or has the plugin installation process been changed on purpose? In the latter case the above mentioned wiki page should be updated.

Comment 4

[alex]

Also see http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&p=10978373

Comment 5

[steve]

Could anybody from Mozilla at least confirm this bug? It's been reported 4 days ago. That would be sweet. Joshua are you on this?

Comment 6

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

official documentation is at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Installing_extensions how do they differ ?

Comment 7

[alex]

Thank you for the pointer, that helped a lot. I'll summarize:

Version: Thunderbird 5.0
Environment: OS X 10.6.8

Steps that will reproduce the problem?
1. Copy an extension (xpi file) to %profile%/extensions/
2. Start Thunderbird

What is the expected result?
The user should get informed that a new extension will get installed (behavior of Thunderbird 3).

What happens instead?
Nothing.

Possible workaround:
Unzip the xpi file to %profile%/extensions/{%bundleid%}. This works with Thunderbird 3 and 5.

Any additional information:
Although the workaround works very well, Imho this change / (intended) regression should be documented somewhere (e.g. in the above mentioned wiki).

Comment 8

[Anton Derbenev]

+ Environment: Windowses {XP, Vista, 7}.

Another possible workaround:
1. prepare .json files for extensions first (can be obtained from %profile%/extensions/staged after manually adding extensions to thunderbird until restarted to install them;
2. put .json's with extensions to %profile%/extensions/staged. If extension was unpacked on adding, it should be unpacked now too. This way most of extensions will left in packed form, which is less fs-capacious and resource-hungry.

Comment 9

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

So we need to update our documentation.

Comment 10

[floppy]

Hi, dear dev's!

I would like to add that this feature also effects the feature to install addons globally, as this was a neat and sweet feature i just have seen and wanted to try, i just found this thread about the problem.

using this (or making it work again) can make the firefox plugin-power even more attracting to businesses - where many users have to use the same plugins under different accounts.

i tried both of the following ways, i found on the net:

1. place .xpi files under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions does not do anything as described in this tread before...
2. firefox -install-global-extension c:\xmarks.xpi does just start firefox also without installing the plugin 

this will make sense on any win7 machine since using an administrator-acc beneath a normal user acc or more than 1 user.

will sw fix it?
cheers, floppy

Comment 11

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

Installing extensions globally is now managed using Enterprise policies:
https://github.com/thundernest/policy-templates#extensionsettings