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Background story: === The good/bad thing about Firefox in Fedora is that we have really the latest greatest Firefox release. This is breaking upstream-provided vimperator from time to time (upstream is not that fast as we are). Usually some hack/workaround is enough, but I have a problem now with :tabopen in vimperator 3.15 (solved by 3.16) which is badly broken against Firefox 51. This issue requires patching (and at the time of reporting, we have Firefox 51 for a pretty long time in Fedora -- but vimperator upstream doesn't provide official updated extension). So here I am, I'm sufficiently determined to package vimperator myself, but it is hard to find info "howto package firefox plugin". === Could we have guidelines? Also, there's a bureaucracy problem: Firefox refuses to automatically load installed plugin from /usr/lib64/firefox/browser/extensions. Could we please change that? That directory is root-owned, and as long as we trust Fedora packagers, we should trust that plugins (as a downstream packager, I don't want/can't request Mozilla for signature of package build) ... or at least it would be nice if we could "white-list" the installed plugin explicitly from extension's spec file. Or what is the way around this?
Hello, you can install your system extensions to /usr/lib64/mozilla/extensions/ (and use firefox ID subdir here). It's a location for system-wide extensions and should be enabled by default. You can also check rpm for existing packaged extensions - mozilla-noscript rpm package for instance. Another thing is that Firefox is moving to WebExtensions fast and XUL extensions may be disabled sooner or later - AFAIK current plan is end of 2017. I'd recommend to check if vimperator is going to switch to WebExtension first to package it in Fedora.
Cool, it sounds like there's a way to package properly ATM. > Another thing is that Firefox is moving to WebExtensions fast and XUL > extensions may be disabled sooner or later - AFAIK current plan is end of > 2017. I'd recommend to check if vimperator is going to switch to > WebExtension first to package it in Fedora. Sorry for the naive question, but does this mean that downstream packaging of Firefox's plugins won't be possible in future (with WebExtension)? Otherwise I think I'm not blocked to package vimperator just now, right? Because if Firefox switched to new plugin format, vimperator is going to be migrated... (I think there's motivation if there's ~30 000 users far). Or what's behind your note?
(In reply to Pavel Raiskup from comment #2) > Cool, it sounds like there's a way to package properly ATM. Sure. > > Another thing is that Firefox is moving to WebExtensions fast and XUL > > extensions may be disabled sooner or later - AFAIK current plan is end of > > 2017. I'd recommend to check if vimperator is going to switch to > > WebExtension first to package it in Fedora. > > Sorry for the naive question, but does this mean that downstream packaging > of Firefox's plugins won't be possible in future (with WebExtension)? I expect it will be possible to package WebExtension based addons. > Otherwise I think I'm not blocked to package vimperator just now, right? Yes, you can package any extension you want. I'm not sure such package is useful (I think direct install via Firefox to Firefox profile from AMO is better) but that's really your decision. > Because if Firefox switched to new plugin format, vimperator is going to > be migrated... (I think there's motivation if there's ~30 000 users > far). Or what's behind your note? If the vimperator is not going to be migrated (I have no idea what's their plans) your package may be obsolete by end of this year.
(In reply to Martin Stransky from comment #3) > If the vimperator is not going to be migrated (I have no idea what's > their plans) your package may be obsolete by end of this year. Thanks. I've googled a bit for this few days ago .. and it seems that the new extension system is a bit less powerful (according to forum rumors) to implement vimperator as is ... so it was a bit unclear to me what is going to happen with vimperator and with firefox projects; one would expect that vimperator is important plugin enough for whole firefox, but apparently it is not; similarly ~30k users of vimperator probably doesn't 100% mean that it is going to survive this firefox's transition. Maybe it all just means should try to migrate to different plugin (or browser). Thanks a lot for your support, Martin. I'm not interested now in the plug-in package guidelines so feel free to reopen if it is on your radar.