828570 - The re-usable modules tutorial refers to the packages directory

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

As mentioned on the mailing list, is this still kosher?

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla-labs-jetpack/uLqBbR0kXS8/aVBCr_QAzFgJ

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/dev-guide/tutorials/reusable-modules.html

Comment 1

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

Yes. Except that I think you have to create the $CUDDLEFISH_ROOT/packages directory yourself, and the doc should probably say this.

If it doesn't work, that's a cfx bug IMO. I just tested it using 1.12 and it worked for me.

Comment 2

[Irakli Gozalishvili [:irakli] [:gozala] [@gozala]]

So we talked about this bug on triage yesterday and I think we should remove mention of packages folder to avoid growing dependencies on feature we know will go away. Unfortunately we don't have an alternative solution yet, other than using git submodules or copying dependencies in the add-on folder itself and then requiring it via relative paths.

Comment 3

[Will Bamberg [:wbamberg]]

The reason I didn't do this back when I updated the docs for packageless, is that it looks like a crappy developer experience.

At the moment the third-party modules story is not great, but it's not too bad. You download the zip, extract it in a particular location, then you can browse the integrated docs to work out what modules it contains and what they do, and use the modules in your add-on. The only real friction, apart from discoverability, is finding out about and satisfying dependencies.

What's the alternative suggestion? You download the zip, extract it somewhere. Look in "lib" and copy the modules into your add-on. How do we know what they do, and how to use them? Look in "doc" (or "docs", it might be called), and open up any .md files you see in there. These are, just about, human readable, but they don't look very nice: https://raw.github.com/voldsoftware/menuitems-jplib/master/docs/menuitems.md. What about dependencies? Oh, go and find "package.json" in the root, open it up and look at the "dependencies" key in there.

It's not unusable by any means, but it's not exactly ergonomic.

So: I can easily rewrite this tutorial like this if you're sure it's what you want, but I don't think it's a good idea.

Comment 4

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

We'll be removing these legacy docs soon.