Add-ons/SDK

Status

This is a draft proposal for the Add-on SDK, of thoughts by andym. It is nothing more than that.

It’s hoped that with community input and collaboration we can clearly communicate to our developers and users where things are in with the Add-on SDK.

Current status

The Add-on SDK is in maintenance mode which means the following:

• security fixes will be applied
• high priority fixes will be applied such as
  • e10s fixes
  • serious stability problems that affect the browser
• all other fixes
  • should be evaluated or ignored? (understanding that even evaluating those and applying criteria takes time)
  • new features will not be accepted

Tasks

Bug triage

• Triage through all the existing bugs in bugzilla to apply the above criteria
• Bugs that don’t meet the above criteria get closed with a reference back to this doc?
• Currently the SDK is on github but patches need to land in mozilla-central. Should we do anything more to clarify this?

Stabilize

• Get jpm tests passing
• Get SDK tests passing with e10s
  • There is a tracking bug on this.
• Pull request triage through the pull requests on github to see what we
  • Can move to a bug in mozilla central.
  • Can close.
• See who is available to help
  • [Module ownership]
  • [Contribute docs]
• Clean up documentation to reflect this eg: [Jetpack|Jetpack]

Maintenance

There are features in the SDK that will need to start to be deprecated as we move towards e10s, the removal of XUL and so on. We will need to build a suitable deprecation plan.

Tasks

• Monthly public meeting or email to review status
• Bug triage of any new SDK bugs

Migration

How can we help move people towards WebExtensions?

• Have WebExtensions be callable from the SDK?
• Have the SDK be callable from WebExtensions?
  • Make a wrapper for WebExtensions in the SDK and then throw a deprecation warning each time its called.
• Specific documentation on how we’d do that.