packaging thunderbird and firefox extensions as RPM in Fedora

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 10:59 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > this is a packaging related question, but fedora-devel in this case is 
> > probably the better place than fedora-packaging for now (when it comes 
> > to actual implemetaion details fedora-packaging probably is better).
> > 
> > Did anybody in recent times look into packaging thunderbird or firefox 
> > extensions as RPMS in fedora? One of my desktops is a x86_64 machine and 
> > getting a proper enigmail for it sometimes is annoying (¹). Caillion 
> > iirc in the past once said packaging extensions would be possible with 
> > future versions of thunderbird and firefox. Are thunderbird and firefox 
> > 2.0 (both in rawhide these days) those future versions or do we have to 
> > wait until 3.0 for proper support? Or are there any workarounds to 
> > somehow make it work now?
> 
> 3.0.  There's no maintainable way to make it work now without querying 
> RPM in %post and requiring triggers.

I eventually managed figured out a way of getting the Firefox extension
packaged as part of the mugshot package to work without having to query
rpm from a scriptlet, but complicated triggers? yep. 

The mugshot scriptlets (and the script they call) are pretty well tested
at this point and heavily commented, so they should be a good starting
point for anybody trying to package a Firefox extension.

My feeling is if there are extensions with binary components, it makes
sense to package them, but for pure Javascript/XUL extensions, it's
probably easier to let users just install them directly into their
account for now.

					- Owen