675197 - toolkit: restartless addons have no way to specify an encoding for bootstrap.js

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Malte Starostik]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Build ID: 20110712112950

Steps to reproduce:

This is basically a variation on the theme of 377498 with XPIProvider as an added ingredient.  I've specified "5 Branch" as a version, but looking at MXR/mozilla-central, the issue seems to apply.

I'm trying to use a restartless addon of which the bootstrap.js file contains localised strings.


Actual results:

XPIProvider.jsm loads the bootstrap script with mozIJSSubScriptLoader's default encoding which sadly happens to be iso-8859-1.  This encoding is rather limited and thus any string not representable in latin1 has to use \u escapes.  This can turn some strings into a pretty unreadable mess.


Expected results:

There should be a way to specify the encoding of bootstrap.js in restartless addons.  One possibility would be via install.rdf.
As a workaround, bootstrap.js can load another script with an explicit encoding.  However, that seems like a kludge especially for smallish helpers that only consist of the bootstrap file and install.rdf.
Apart from that and given that there are probably not too many restartless addons affected *yet*, I'd strongly vote for defaulting to utf-8 instead of that ugly legacy that is latin1.

Comment 1

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

No activity for a while and probably fixed/not needed anymore. Closing.