836965 - Automatically use SDK APIs shipped with Firefox for all Jetpack add-ons

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Attachment: WIP

This patch does a neat thing. It detects if an XPI is jetpack based by looking for a harness-options.json file. If there instead of loading bootstrap.js from the XPI it loads a pre-shipped version. This version is altered slightly so that for any modules in the addon-sdk space it loads them direct from Firefox ignoring those in the XPI.

The patch applies against a current Larch checkout.

Irakli do you think this is worth pursuing?

Comment 1

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

Dave I talked with Alex about it and also Cc-ed him to an email thread we had. He had some concerns (I'm afraid I don't remember them now) relation to existing add-ons. We also had to make certain changes to `bootstrap.js` to make loader / cfx work with modules in FF which would also probably conflict with this.

I'll let Alex comment with concerns he raised, but either way I thin it would be better if we hold on doing this for a little while. I'd be more comfortable with shipping `bootstrap.js` and non sdk modules with .xpi for a little while. After
we're sure all is smooth we can do this. It just that if we do it now and discover some issues with sdk in FF, it will be more complicated to do a fix.

Comment 2

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I'm fine with that, this was largely a strawman proposal at this point.

Comment 3

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

My view of this proposal is that it would only happen for a range of SDK versions, likely 1.12 -> 1.14.

The rules would be:

* if an add-on is loaded and has a version lower than 1.12, the xpi-embedded APIs are used. We could consider a lower cut-off version where we refuse to load the add-on, but I'd need to do some analysis of what the user impact would be.

* if an add-on is loaded with a version of 1.12 or higher, the firefox-embedded APIs are used.

Comment 4

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

Lets come back to this after the current changes have baked for a bit.