930244 - Ensure Add-ons Manager components are never loaded in child processes

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

The Add-ons Manager code doesn't like being in a child process. And why should it? Let's disallow that, with the help of bug 930243.

Comment 1

[Andreas Wagner [:TheOne] [use NI]]

Mike, could you add more information about what's needed to fix this bug if it's still valid? Thanks.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

We do have this:
http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/AddonManager.jsm#18-21

But the bug subject references "components", if we want to be really thorough we could add similar logic to related modules like XPIProvider.jsm etc.

Comment 3

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Well, the idea to fix this is to add 'process=main' clauses to the relevant component definitions in https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/extensions.manifest.
You can find examples of this syntax in that file already.

This will guard against the use of these components in the content process by any consumer of the addon manager via XPCOM, be it JS or C++ code.

Comment 4

[surbhianand231994]

Is this bug still valid? I will like to take it up.

Comment 5

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

I guess its still valid, this isn't something that's been a problem in practice.  And a lot of the addons manager code is loaded with the subscript loader instead of XPCOM.  But if you'd like to write a patch to annotate some more of the contents of extesions.manifest, we would take it.

Do you need help getting started with that, or are you interested in finding another good first bug in the addons manager to work on?

Comment 6

[surbhianand231994]

I would prefer taking some other beginner bug to start with. I am taking up Bug ID: 1440700.

Comment 7

[Mark Striemer [:mstriemer]]

Removing [good first bug]. This might be a simple fix but I don't think it is obvious to a beginner (or myself) what actually needs to be done here.

Andrew, should we just close this? It looks like you weren't convinced we needed to do anything.

Comment 8

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

The only parts of the addon manager that are actually loaded via xpcom are the parts that are used from content processes.
I don't think there's really anything to do here.