673054 - Better error reporting in NPAPI

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[lekma]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110628 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.18
Build ID: 20110628231248




Expected results:

Following up on bug 670629, it would be useful if plugins could report errors back to the user.

Comment 1

[lekma]

Proposal 1 - Use the console service:
NPN_Report(const char *message, uint32_t flags, const char *sourceName, uint32_t lineNumber)
(This could also accept a sourceLine and columnNumber params to draw an arrow in the error console, but I don't really see the point.)
This would create nsIScriptError objects and log them to the console.

Proposal 2 - Use the JSAPI:
NPN_Report(const char *message, uint32_t flags)
This would use JS_ReportError or JS_ReportWarning depending on the flags value.
(I didn't propose a format + variable argument list because I don't think a va_list would cross the ipc boundaries.)

Any feedback/suggestions/other proposals are welcome.

P.S.: I can give a try implementing any of these proposals (In fact I already did proposal 1), but I'need a little bit of help.

Comment 2

[lekma]

Attachment: proposed patch for proposal 1

the test is not quite good because I don't know how to avoid the enablePrivilege issue. (I'm sure there are other problems...)

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Flash is the only NPAPI now, and is considered legacy, so we're not going to implement further improvements.