974469 - Ship parts of Fennec's omni.ja as unpackaged Android assets

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Testing, defect)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

At the moment, Fennec ships a monolithic omni.ja comprising all sorts of assets (chrome HTML, CSS, and JS; components and modules JS{M}).  This omni.ja is built during packaging and incorporates assets from all over the tree.

It would be nice to include the Fennec-specific assets directly in the Fennec APK.  This would allow Fennec developers to package an omni.ja containing things they are not likely to touch once, and then continually update the things they are likely to touch in the APK assets/ directory.  Combined with Bug 974462, this would make front-end development a lot faster: the single omni.ja would be packaged and deployed once, while the small amount of Fennec specific chrome would be re-packed without needing packaging.

This might be as simple as implementing an android_asset:// protocol handler, or file:///android_asset/ (like WebView -- see https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base.git/+/android-4.2.2_r1/core/java/android/webkit/BrowserFrame.java).

I could imagine this completely breaking l10n repacks, so it might be wanted only for developer builds.

Comment 1

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

This is relevant for access to fonts from Android content, right?

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #1)
> This is relevant for access to fonts from Android content, right?

It could.  We already have support for this, though: GeckoJarReader can extract from omni.ja.

Comment 3

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Mass closing Firefox for Android :: Testing bugs with no progress in 2017.

If this bug is important to you, please re-open.