Comments on: Outdated extensions are depressing sometimes

By: justdave

justdave — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:21:19 +0000

I recommend against doing anything in that addonsmirror link, btw. Use Nightly Tester Tools to do it. Modifying the files is asking for trouble.

By: tim

tim — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:30:55 +0000

How funny!
I just found you on a google search i did about bumping the extension version, which I wanted to do to fix the VERY SAME EXTENSION!
Yes, Imap really sux without that feature.
Apparently they are working to make that all better.
In the meantime, this might help?

http://forum.addonsmirror.net/index.php?showtopic=973

By: funtom

funtom — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:58:23 +0000

Well, an idea on how to help ceasing the pain at least, has come to my mind many times. I mean the help of AMO service. I suppose, an extension stops working sinc either the app’s version falls out of the minVersion/maxVersion range, or some API call’s changed.
I’m not familiar with procedures, especially those behind the scene, that take place on an extension submit. But what I can clearly see, is the way AMO takes part in mainteining the extension, or in helping their respective authors at least.
AMO, in conjunction with MoCo devs should know of those API calls that have been deprecated. Some of them might be merely replaced with the new one, then the maxVersion param bumped a notch and voila a new version comes out. All automagically, no bothering extension authors needed.
Is that too difficult to implement it?

By: Cameron

Cameron — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:07:23 +0000

And this is why people should open source their code.

By: Dao

Dao — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:20:57 +0000

Thunderbird 2 supports the extensions.checkCompatibility pref. You can set it to false.

By: Jay Levitt

Jay Levitt — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:30:50 +0000

Ian: It technically *is* built into core, but it’s never actually worked properly. Sync On Arrival brute-forces it somehow so that TB actually does what you’ve otherwise configured it to do – get your mail.

By: Ian M

Ian M — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:08:19 +0000

Gerv brought the same issue up recently.

Personally, my opinion is that the Mozilla guys should adopt the most widely used extensions that get abandoned.

Also, I don’t use Thunderbird but this “Sync On Arrival” extension sounds like something that should be built into the core release anyway.

By: justdave

justdave — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:58:50 +0000

Yeah, making a Thunderbird extension compatible with Firefox would work real well

But I know what you mean. But the average Joe isn’t going to figure out how to do that, so I guess it’s more just getting attention to the issue.

Abandoned extensions suck when they’re good

By: Eric Shepherd

Eric Shepherd — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:05:57 +0000

All you need to do is change the maxVersion field in the extension’s install.rdf file to reflect compatibility with, say, Firefox 4.0. Then you’re good to go.

By: mkanat

mkanat — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:17:26 +0000

This makes me think about how we’re going to do Bugzilla extensions. I think we won’t prevent people from installing extensions that have too low of a maxVersion, we’ll just warn them before they install it.

-Max