sense of packaging firefox' addons?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I would say yes here, but of course addons are often updated and even if you did
>  push out an addon in a livecd spin the addons would up out of date quickly.  If
>  the user was keeping persistent state with a livecd spin they may prefer using
>  the firefox installed addons directly in the user's profile.  The conflict of
>  having both install choices is present there too if the persistent state stuff
>  gets up to speed.

Persistent state storage...via a usb dongle... makes for an
interesting subclass of the general problem.

If you have system-wide plugins and per-user versions of the same
plugin..how exactly does that interaction work.  Even in the normal
install case, there will be times when a user may want to grab a newer
version of the same plugin that is installed system-wide.  Can we
really deal with that?

I'm not sure going down the path of system wide firefox plugins is a
good idea for the repository. If people were going to do it, I'd want
experiment with it in a very limited way initially. Maybe one or two
plugins that you can make a strong case for having a a system wide
install but not in the firefox package itself. And you'd have to work
out how the system wide versions interact with user versions of the
same plugin (both older and newer) over some period of time. And you
have to figure out if users can enable/disable the system wide
version.  It's complicated. The firefox plugins generally are geared
for per-user control. And you certainly can have some oddness with
combinations of plugins enabled, so enabling installed plugins by
default may not be possible without affecting end-user experiences...
which reduces the usefulness of packaging these things for system-wide
consumption.

What I don't want to see is a huge explosion of these plugins in the
repo, just because its easy to get them packaged up.  We need to have
some care here as to whether there's a good case for offering these up
centrally, compared to other software we could be packaging.  I'm just
not sure if firefox's plugin design is really meant to handle
something like 200 system wide plugins installed for users to then
pick and choose to enable/disable.

-jef