Category: Mozilla

I just landed a lovely patch from Lev Serebryakov that does several awesome things for mozStorage (Bug 333848):

• Adds support to allow functions to return values
• Adds support for aggregate functions
• Adds support for progress handlers (which can cancel long running queries)

I want to thank Lev for putting up with massive delays on getting reviews for his code, and adding xpcshell unit tests along with the C++ test. The thing I really like about having xpcshell unit tests is that it shows you how to use the API with JavaScript (I won’t get into how testing also helps you design a better API…). If you want to see how to the new stuff works, check out the test files.

My last post keeps getting comments, and I’m seeing this brought up on the amo-editors mailing list a lot. Add-on authors have two big questions:

1. How do I get reviews for my add-on?
2. Do external reviews count?

These are both very good questions, but sadly, I haven’t seen a really good answer to either yet.

How do I get reviews for my add-on?

All you have to do is get people to post reviews to your add-on in the sandbox. Yes, there is a slight barrier to entry with this process since AMO requires users to first sign up and then enable the sandbox before they can even post a review. This process is still being smoothed out by the AMO developers (last I knew), so things may get a bit easier. One of the editors has written up a wiki page with directions on how to post a review that you can link your users to.

There are a number of ways in which you can obtain reviews for your add-on. If you extension is site-specify, post on that site about it, and get the users interested in it. If it targets a specific group, perhaps you should reach out to that group through a mailing list or forum. Blogging is quite popular these days, so blog about your add-on; get your friends to blog about it! Perhaps we should start a wiki page and let add-on authors share how they are getting the word out about their add-on.

Do external reviews count?

They certainly can in my book! The catch is that editors are not likely to go out looking for them, so you should absolutely provide URLs to them in your notes to the review section when nominating your add-on for public status. If you don’t provide links, you should expect that we won’t find them.

I hope this clears things up a bit. If you have any questions, feel free to mail the editors list (amo-editors at mozilla dot org) or post comments here.

Did you know you can mark bugzilla comments, making them appear to be highlighted? timeless recently pointed this out on irc, and I figured a lot of people didn’t know about this really neat feature. All you have to do is add &mark={comments} to the query string of the url, and can you can highlight away! The comments can be specified in a comma separated list, and/or you can specify ranges.

I’ve marked up my first fixed bug as an example.

I landed the upgrade to SQLite today to get us up to version 3.3.17. The version in trunk is horribly old, so we really need this upgrade. Sadly, Windows didn’t like it and the patch is now backed out again :(

Hopefully I’ll get a patch tomorrow that doesn’t hang on shutdown. Now, I’m off to go play in the land of multi-threaded code – hurray!

Two more download manager back-end changes landed recently. First, Bug 382825 added a potentially useful method:

void retryDownload(in unsigned long aID);

This will retry a download with the specified id, and fails if it cannot find the download in the database or if the download is currently in progress.

Then Bug 382839 landed, which enables getDownload to return both active downloads and any download that is in the database. Extension authors will not have to directly query the database to get the information they need about the download.

I think this is probably about it for back-end changes for Firefox 3. Still fixing a few random regressions that have popped up, and an interesting leak was found, but otherwise, it is about time to move onto the UI overhaul!