Privileged (packaged) apps on Firefox desktop?

[Andrew Sutherland]

Being an IMAP-supporting email app requires being a privileged app. It
seems like it's not currently possible to easily install privileged apps
that are under development on Firefox desktop. Is there a way to
accomplish this or open bugs to follow?

Context: discussion on the email.js mailing list about making the
whiteout.io email app work on both Firefox OS and Firefox desktop and
some investigation results that conclude it's at least not obvious:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/emailjs/x9xGu2xHrbE/D-N6z7u8QRUJ.
There's also interest from the Gaia email app developers in making a
different email UI but reusing the Gaia email app's backend.

Thanks!
Andrew

[Austin King]

Hi Andrew,
The BetaChannel project aims to make it easy to distribute privileged
packaged apps.

Get involved!
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Projects/BetaChannel

We've just renamed the project (from BetaFox), so the offical dev
environment is down (bug#1042418).

You can play with my temporary version at http://d2gk.co/

I'm taking a break from the project, I'd ping bwalker in #openwebapps to
understand the status and next steps.

thanks,
ozten

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[Myk Melez]

> Andrew Sutherland <mailto:asuth...@asutherland.org>
> 2014 July 29 at 18:35

> Being an IMAP-supporting email app requires being a privileged app. It
> seems like it's not currently possible to easily install privileged
> apps that are under development on Firefox desktop. Is there a way to
> accomplish this or open bugs to follow?

Folks have done this with hacks in the past. I'm unsure about the
current state of the art, so I'm cc:ing Marco, who may know (especially
since he's done it with the Gaia email app!).

As for bugs, the most relevant one is 987848
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987848>, which is about
enabling you to connect devtools to a desktop app from the Web IDE (n�e
App Manager).

The discussion in that bug assumes the app is already installed, but
surely Web IDE integration would also include support for installing an
app. That may want to be tracked in a different bug, however. cc: jryans
in case he knows of a more relevant bug.

> Context: discussion on the email.js mailing list about making the
> whiteout.io email app work on both Firefox OS and Firefox desktop and
> some investigation results that conclude it's at least not obvious:
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/emailjs/x9xGu2xHrbE/D-N6z7u8QRUJ.
> There's also interest from the Gaia email app developers in making a
> different email UI but reusing the Gaia email app's backend.

That'd be swell, and we need to make this easier. Your
thoughts/bugs/etc. are most welcome!

-myk

[jry...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 12:35:29 PM UTC-5, Myk Melez wrote:
> > Andrew Sutherland <mailto:asuth...@asutherland.org>
> > 2014 July 29 at 18:35
> > Being an IMAP-supporting email app requires being a privileged app. It
> > seems like it's not currently possible to easily install privileged
> > apps that are under development on Firefox desktop. Is there a way to
> > accomplish this or open bugs to follow?
>
> Folks have done this with hacks in the past. I'm unsure about the
> current state of the art, so I'm cc:ing Marco, who may know (especially
> since he's done it with the Gaia email app!).
>
> As for bugs, the most relevant one is 987848
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987848>, which is about
> enabling you to connect devtools to a desktop app from the Web IDE (n�e
> App Manager).
>
> The discussion in that bug assumes the app is already installed, but
> surely Web IDE integration would also include support for installing an
> app. That may want to be tracked in a different bug, however. cc: jryans
> in case he knows of a more relevant bug.

Yes, that's the right bug for debugging desktop apps. I'd love for us to make more progress in this area. I think many app developers would see more value in the desktop app platform if debugging were simpler, so this seems like a pretty critical problem to solve for the desktop app developer workflow. It's possible to debug them today, but it is quite convoluted and confusing (or at least that was the state last time I tried it).

I see that Myk also commented in bug 1038533 about installing packaged apps on desktop. Again, that's another angle I hope we can improve in WebIDE.

I've created bug 1049815 as a meta bug to track such issues with the desktop app workflow. If you know of more such issues, please file!

- Ryan