rpm packages of thunderbird/firefox extensions

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Christopher Aillon schrieb:
> Orion Poplawski wrote:
>> A little over a year ago I asked about packaging Firefox extensions and 
>> was told things would be better in Firefox 1.1.  We now have 1.5.  Are 
>> we ready to start packaging Firefox extensions?
> 
> Things are better, but nowhere near great.  The fact that Firefox 
> doesn't use versioned libraries means that every time the version 
> changes upstream, the on-disk directory changes.

Would it be possible to do something similar to the plugins-scheme in
the mozilla-based stuff in Fedora? e.g. install all extensions to

/usr/lib{,64}/{mozilla,firefox,thunderbird}/1.5/extensions/

an we make somehow sure that those apps find them there? Maybe with some
scripts that create symlinks where they belong (yes, that's a bit scary,
I know.

Site note: maybe we can even get rid of the "1.5" in above example, but
I'm not sure.

>  In any case, things 
> are probably "good enough" since extensions can be properly installed 
> and uninstalled without manual user intervention.   Take a look at what 
> beagle does to install its extension.
> 
> Just before I sent this, I thought of a potentially big problem 
> though..... the automatic software update that Firefox has.  It's 
> extremely likely that extensions can installed via RPM, then updated via 
> the software updater, and then rpmdb will not match what's on disk, 
> causing potential problems for future rpm operations such as rpm -U, rpm 
> -e, and obviously rpm -V.

Well, firefox would need to run as root to overwrite what's on disk.
People doing such stuff did something totally wrong already and probably
don't care to much about rpm -{UeV}.

> We probably need a solution for that before we start shipping extensions 
> as part of extras.

Well, we probably should start with one or two extensions and see how it
works out before we start more.

CU
thl