811560 - cfx needs a flag to allow addons to use custom top level directories

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Comment 1

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

This issue came up for r2d2b2g

Comment 2

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

Patches welcome.

Comment 3

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

I do not clearly understand what is requested here, can we have more info about this?

Would it be something like this?

  $ cd my-addon
  $ cfx xpi --include-in-xpi=../my-dir
  $ ls my-addon.xpi
   my-dir/
   resources/
   install.rdf
   ...

Irakli told me about some plan to simplify xpi layout and avoid resources/ folder and put addon files directly into addon root folder. If I understood irakli plans and this bug correctly, we may just do this instead of adding this new cfx flag?

Comment 4

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

(In reply to Alexandre Poirot (:ochameau) from comment #3)
> I do not clearly understand what is requested here, can we have more info
> about this?
> 
> Would it be something like this?
> 
>   $ cd my-addon
>   $ cfx xpi --include-in-xpi=../my-dir
>   $ ls my-addon.xpi
>    my-dir/
>    resources/
>    install.rdf
>    ...

Yes, that's mostly right, except that my-dir/ would be inside the my-addon/ directory in the case of my addon, whose directory structure would look something like this:

    my-addon/
        data/
        lib/
        package.json
        my-dir/


See <https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g/issues/78> for more information on the use case.

And note that this flag would have to work with `cfx run` as well, since that command packages the addon.  For that reason, and because it's easier to specify it once than every time you run a command, it would be better to make this a package.json property like `extraDirs` (or `extraFiles`, and let people specify files in addition to dirs, which makes no difference to the packaging code).

> Irakli told me about some plan to simplify xpi layout and avoid resources/
> folder and put addon files directly into addon root folder. If I understood
> irakli plans and this bug correctly, we may just do this instead of adding
> this new cfx flag?

That'd probably help.  When I encountered the problem that prompted this feature request, I had a directory data/profile/ that was packaged into the XPI at resources/r2d2b2g/data/profile/.  If it was packaged at data/profile/ instead, that would save 19 characters of space in the path, which would probably be enough.

Comment 5

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

This will no longer be an issue when bug 915376 is done, at which point xpi is made using zip, can we wontfix it?

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I agree, as a rule though I tend to keep bugs open until the thing that obsoletes them has landed.

Comment 7

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

Sorry we won't be releasing any new versions of cfx, jpm is the replacement https://www.npmjs.com/package/jpm