959152 - We should be able to initialize a .jsm without using a xpcom component.

Status: NEW

(Core :: XPCOM, defect)

Description

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

It is common to need to load a .jsm at startup-up.

At the moment, the only way to do this is:
1. write Foo.jsm;
2. write a XPCOM component FooStartup implementing nsIObserver to observe profile-after-change and open Foo.jsm;
3. register FooStartup through a manifest to observe profile-after-change.

That's ugly and error-prone.

I would like a mechanism that would like me skip point 2.

Example clients: Telemetry, Session Restore, Crash Monitor, ...

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Yes please. I'm not sure we need this to be extensible: could we just have a list of JSMs and the method to call on them in some file?

Comment 2

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

Well, I suspect that it would be useful also for add-ons, plus I have the intuition that making it a hard-coded list will not play very nicely with our objective to support many products with a single tree. We can certainly get away with pre-processing, but I'd rather do without if possible.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Restartless addons already have their own startup notification, and I don't want to design around old-style addons at all.

I've been burned hard in the past by having lists of things to start up in XPCOM categories and dealing with ordering. I'd much rather have our startup order be explicit lists of things to start up. If we need to have separate lists for "the platform" and each app, that's great, but I strongly prefer specific lists to manifests/categories/general lists.

Comment 4

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

Could we piggyback on the mechanism used by restartless add-ons?

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Not really, that's all part of the addon-manager calling the startup() method of bootstrap.js