rpm packages of thunderbird/firefox extensions

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Tue Sep 5 20:54:13 UTC 2006


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.  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.

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




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