781486 - Implement Jetpack file API on top of OS.File

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P2)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Mozilla-central is getting a new low-level, asynchronous, high-performance, JavaScript file API. A higher-level Jetpack API should be designed and implemented to make this file API comfortable for end users.

Comment 2

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

My two cents are that we should either use OS.File as is and use only one JS api in Mozilla priviledged world - or - go with standards and contribute to Web API efforts:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/FileReader
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/FileHandleAPI
http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-writer.html
http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-dir-sys.html
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-firefox/

Comment 3

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

I believe that this depends on the priorities. As far as I understand, we are not going to implement FileWriter in any foreseeable future and OS.File is bound to be more powerful than anything DOM-ish. But, of course, less standard.

Comment 4

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Just casually looking at it, I think we'd need to depend on bug 820953 so we can get TextDecoder/TextEncoder to deal with string encoding, since they don't seem to be present in SDK addon's normal context, and I don't see any way to import them.

Comment 5

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

We strongly need an off main thread file API for Jetpack, however it is implemented. Additionally, part of the feedback gathered during the Summit is that add-on developers need such a feature.

Unless there are very good reasons to do otherwise, I suggest going ahead and publishing OS.File to Jetpack.

Comment 6

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

In today's roundtable, we agreed on changing the `io/fs` implementation to use OS.File where appropriate to take advantage of the off-main-thread IO

Comment 8

[Yonggang Luo]

Yeap here.

Comment 9

[Yonggang Luo]

I am curious why OS.File doesn't support both async and sync mode, weird.

Comment 10

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

(In reply to Yonggang Luo from comment #9)
> I am curious why OS.File doesn't support both async and sync mode, weird.

Because sync I/O freezes the browser, so we want to make sure people never do any sync I/O.

Comment 11

[Yonggang Luo]

:Yoric, that's not the point, in worker, we can use both sync and async APIs.

Comment 12

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Yonggang Luo, ah, right, we could also have an async mode in workers.

Well, anyway, looks like Jetpack is basically dead, so WONTFIX.