On 10/30/2013 10:55 PM, Jorge Villalobos wrote:
> Cross posting to dev.planning, where I originally intended this to be.
> Please follow up to dev.planning.
> 
> Jorge
> 
> On 10/30/13 3:42 PM, Jorge Villalobos wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> As many of you know, the Add-ons Team, User Advocacy Team, Firefox Team
>> and others have been collaborating for over a year in a project called
>> Squeaky [1]. Our aim is to improve user experience for add-ons,
>> particularly add-ons that we consider bad for various levels of "bad".
>>
>> Part of our work consists on pushing forward improvements in Firefox
>> that we think will significantly achieve our goals, which is why I'm
>> submitting this spec for discussion:
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SZx7NlaMeFxA55-u8blvgCsPIl041xaJO5YLdu6HyOk/edit?usp=sharing
>>
>> The Add-on File Registration System is intended to create an add-on file
>> repository that all add-on developers need to submit their files to.
>> This repository won't publish any of the files, and inclusion won't
>> require more than passing a series of automatic malware checks. We will
>> store the files and generated hashes for them.
>>
>> On the client side, Firefox will compute the hashes of add-on files
>> being installed and query the API for it. If the file is registered, it
>> can be installed, otherwise it can't (there is planned transition period
>> to ease adoption). There will also be periodic checks of installed
>> add-ons to make sure they are registered. All AMO files would be
>> registered automatically.
>>
>> This system will allow us to better keep track of add-on IDs, be able to
>> easily find the files they correspond to, and have effective
>> communication channels to their developers. It's not a silver bullet to
>> solve add-on malware problems, but it raises the bar for malware developers.
>>
>> We believe this strikes the right balance between a completely closed
>> system (where only AMO add-ons are allowed) and the completely open but
>> risky system we currently have in place. Developers are still free to
>> distribute add-ons as they please, while we get a much-needed set of
>> tools to fight malware and keep it at bay.
>>
>> There are more details in the doc, so please give it a read and post
>> your comments and questions on this thread.
>>
>> Jorge Villalobos
>> Add-ons Developer Relations Lead
>>
>> [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO/Squeaky
>>
> 

Can everyone submit an add-on to Squeaky? Or only the add-on developer?
I ask this because to me it's not clear what happens to the metadata,
like in install.rdf. It's still necessary sometimes to edit this file,
especially for the targetApplication's maxVersion. There are also other
local edits (forks or branches) possible to existing add-ons, that are
not (yet) in the official version.

Onno
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