[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] Packaging WebExtensions

[Sean Whitton]

Dear Sebastian,

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 02:29:35PM +0200, Sebastian Noack wrote:
> as you might know, Firefox is moving away from traditional Gecko
> extensions, towards WebExtensions which are essentially the same as
> Chrome extensions.

Right.  We need to update our tools, but the work hasn't started yet.[1]

> WebExtensions don't need an install.rdf manifest. In fact the
> documentation indicates that is has been deprecated as part of legacy
> extensions [1]. Still, I would have to create an install.rdf, just so
> that I can use install-xpi.
> 
> However, it is much simpler, and probably not any less appropriate
> than relying on deprecated mechanisms, to simple use debian/install
> and debian/links files, in order to achieve the same result, as I did
> here [2].
> 
> But I wonder whether this is the way how Firefox extensions are
> supposed to be packaged in the future. Otherwise, mozilla-devscripts
> would have to be updated, in order to support WebExtensions properly,
> unless I miss something.
> 
> Also I wonder whether it still makes sense to package Firefox and
> Chromium extensions separately, if the the only difference is either a
> symlink in /usr/share/mozilla/extensions/ or a script with one line in
> /etc/chromium.d.

Thank you for these suggestions.  It would be great if Firefox and
Chrome addons could just be under a webextension-* namespace.

I think the best thing might be to have a meeting about this with any
pkg-mozext people at Deb[Camp|Conf], to figure out a transition plan.

-- 
Sean Whitton
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