[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] WebExtension for Thunderbird?

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hi,

now after DebCamp and DebConf and the arriving home again from Taiwan I
finished the work on getting Thunderbird 60.0 into unstable. I needed to
upload a version -2 to get the build on misp64el fixed. Looks promising
so far.

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=thunderbird

So the next "problem" is not far away. What's the status quo on the
various packaged extensions? Some minutes ago Adrian Bunk has started to
file bugs with severity serious against packages that are not working
with FF >= 60.0. What about Thunderbird 60.0?

It's currently some kind difficult to get information from the Mozilla
Thunderbird team about the status of WebExtension for Thunderbird and in
detail what's needed on the existing extension side to get them working
in 60.x. The following things are mostly what I have got from somewhere
and how I see this.

So far I've taken information from the tb-driver mailing list the long
term version of Thunderbird 60 will never get the full WebExtension
implementation over the lifetime as Firefox already have. But some
things need to be done so TB 60.x can recognize the old extension(s).

1. The install.rdf file needs to be replaced by a file manifest.json.

2. The manifest.json file needs a key:value pair '"legacy": true,'.

3. The manifest.json file must have a prober WebExtension format.

4. The structure of the extension isn't changing so far.

The comm-central build of Thunderbird will get the WebExtension
implementation starting with TB 63.0.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_63

For porting existing AddOns Mozilla has created an entry to their
developers platform.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_legacy_Firefox_add-on

What does this means (especially for TB)?

I'm not sure if AddOns build with the new debhelper from Ximin will or
can work in TB >= 60.0, I simply haven't tested it. Building the
packages with the xul-ext helper is still working and valid AddOns are
still working built this way.
So for now I'd suggest to do the packaging of TB related packages still
with xul-ext, but name the binary package 'webext-foo'. We can switch to
dh-webext every time later.

We will need to figure out what we as Debian want or can do to improve
the situation on the existing packages for TB. I think we need at least
a correct version in the 'Breaks' field for Thunderbird so non valid
packages will be removed and users can use a upstream version if
sufficient. I have no overview of the packages that are needed to be
reviewed here, any help is appreciated.

We will need to document the needed steps for getting old extensions
working with TB >= 60.

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianWebextensionTeam

-- 
Regards
Carsten Schoenert