Getting an abandoned Extension signed

[Oomingmak]

I am NOT a developer of any kind (it's way out of my league) but I have read online that it possible to get extensions signed for personal use.

All of my extensions are signed except for one. It's an old extension that I rely on a lot and which is unlikely to have any compatibility issues due to its simplicity (it just saves shortcuts). The developer has discontinued development of the extension and his web site that hosts them is about to shut down in a few weeks time.

http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/#create-shortcut

I'm just wondering whether it is possible and/or permissible to get an extension signed for personal use if you are not the author.

I did a little test run here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/develo ... n/submit/2 (using the 'do not list add-on on this site' option, because this was just a test, and I have no intention of publishing other people's work).

At first, the extension was not accepted because it had some out of date or missing stuff in its rdf. I don't know anything about that kind of thing, but I looked at a signed extension to see the kinds of fields that were included and I tried to replicate this in the rdf of the shortcut that I was trying to get signed. When I tried uploading again, the extension was accepted and the form said that it would be auto-signed. However, it required a 'Platform compatibility' option to be selected in order to proceed, but those options were all grayed out and unselectable. If I reloaded the form, then the options would become selectable, but the extension was no longer listed, and as soon as I re-uploaded the extension, the 'Platform compatibility' options would become greyed out again. So there was no way to get to the next page.

So my question is: seeing as extension-signing is now mandatory, is there anyway that I can get this favourite old extension signed for my own use in order to prevent it from being blocked in future versions of Firefox?

Thanks

[Benjamin Markson]

It should be possible, I've done the same with a couple of no longer published add-ons.

The main thing you need to do is to change the (unique) em:id - the {7c9a24c3-9d29-43cf-9264-d3ec3ea607c2} bit - to something like: CreateShortcut@mozilla.org - it just has to be unique for your upload. The history of this predates my writing of add-ons but the {numbers} style isn't used any more.

It's also worth bumping the maxVersion to say: 48.* although this can be altered later.

You might also like to change the name, I'd go for: <em:name>Create Shortcut [private]</em:name> so that I could tell it apart from my 'regular' add-ons in about:addons.

Otherwise, I don't see anything special about the install.rdf.

Ben.

[morat]

Try disabling your extensions before loading the submission page. Something may be breaking the site.

Try adding the targetPlatform property in the install.rdf file.

Code: Select all

- <em:id>{7c9a24c3-9d29-43cf-9264-d3ec3ea607c2}</em:id>
+ <em:id>createshortcut2@example.com</em:id>

- <em:name>Create Shortcut</em:name>
+ <em:name>Create Shortcut 2</em:name>

  <em:optionsURL>chrome://createshortcut/content/createshortcutSettings.xul</em:optionsURL>
+ <em:targetPlatform>WINNT_x86-msvc</em:targetPlatform>

- <em:maxVersion>9.0.*</em:maxVersion>
+ <em:maxVersion>50.*</em:maxVersion>

Extension Signing
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Addons/Extension_Signing

Install Manifests
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add ... _Manifests

Valid Application Versions
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox ... pversions/

Chrome Registration
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... gistration