Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

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tonymec
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by tonymec »

rsx11m wrote:
tonymec wrote:I haven't tried it; but the userC* files in the profile haven't changed much in a very long time, at least since Firefox 0.10, and I'd bet even money that Netscape 4.7 and earlier already had them.

Err, I don't think the pre-Gecko/XPFE Netscapes had the userChrome.* configuration options?
http://mxr.mozilla.org/classic/search?string=userChrome.css doesn't show any hits.

In that case I lose that bet. Heads-or-tails isn't as if I'd put, according to two expressions often used in my native French, «my hand in the fire» or «my head to be lopped off». ;-)
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Lemon Juice »

smsmith wrote:
therube wrote:Perhaps some sort of "Did it work: (Yes|No|Partially|No-reply)" button?
Thereby tracking (hash) Extension/version/work-yn, building a DB.

What would also be relatively neat... after conversion, I had to download the extension. If those were stored, and coupled with therube's idea about a "Did it work" button, someone could download the already converted version. All you'd need to do is make a simple page listing the extension name, the results of the "Did it work" button/survey and the download link.


Actually, I had an even bigger vision for what could be an ultimate modded extensions site for SeaMonkey and it would combine my converter with a collection of manually modded extensions like the current one at mozdev.org (by Philip Chee?). Therefore, users would have a central place where to look for extensions. The 'easy' extensions would be handled by the converter, the ones requiring manual work would be uploaded by developers who modded them themselves. They would all be listed in one place and the users would be redirected either to the converter or to the manually modded version for download.

Moreover, I thought the converter could be extended to allow modifications targeted to specific extension - a kind of patch or unique search and replace mechanism for a specific extension only. This way if an extension is too complex to be modded automatically a developer could provide a patch which would later on be applied automatically by the converter to this specific extension. The advantage of this solution would be that such a patch would work (with high probability) even on future versions of the extension so users would always get the newest version instead a manually modded version that was converted a long time ago by someone and then abandoned due to various reasons.

As you can see there can be quite a number of ideas to make availability of extensions easier, however all of this needs manpower :)
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by patrickjdempsey »

The problem ultimately becomes an issue like that which is being experienced at mozdev right now, and userScripts.org... who shall maintain the hardware and for how long? That gets tricky!
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Lemon Juice »

I think there are quite a number of free hosts, some of them quite friendly towards such non-profit projects. Longevity of servers can never be guaranteed but this could work with a periodic remote backup solution where the project could simply change hosts in case of problems. This wouldn't need a powerful server since SM user base is quite small and unlikely to generate heavy traffic. If it was possible to put it under a subdomain of one of the stable and SM-friendly 'big guys' like seamonkey-project.org or mozillazine.org it would be very good for stability of the web address.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by tonymec »

Lemon Juice wrote:I think there are quite a number of free hosts, some of them quite friendly towards such non-profit projects. Longevity of servers can never be guaranteed but this could work with a periodic remote backup solution where the project could simply change hosts in case of problems. This wouldn't need a powerful server since SM user base is quite small and unlikely to generate heavy traffic. If it was possible to put it under a subdomain of one of the stable and SM-friendly 'big guys' like seamonkey-project.org or mozillazine.org it would be very good for stability of the web address.

Well, to all appearances Mozdev used to be “a SeaMonkey-friendly ‘big guy’ ” but for some days I haven't been able to connect to it. OTOH, Mozillazine doesn't host add-ons (AFAIK it has Mediawiki software for its KB and forum software for these forums, but nothing where you could host add-ons), and I think the seamonkey-project.org admins (who are few in number and administer the site in their free time, BTW) favour addons.mozilla.org and possibly Mozdev. Of course AMO won't accept independent add-ons with the same addon ID but administered by different people.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Mozdev has a failing harddrive and they have shut it down so they can work on getting a new server before letting the drive crash and burn.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Lemon Juice »

tonymec wrote:Well, to all appearances Mozdev used to be “a SeaMonkey-friendly ‘big guy’ ” but for some days I haven't been able to connect to it. OTOH, Mozillazine doesn't host add-ons (AFAIK it has Mediawiki software for its KB and forum software for these forums, but nothing where you could host add-ons), and I think the seamonkey-project.org admins (who are few in number and administer the site in their free time, BTW) favour addons.mozilla.org and possibly Mozdev. Of course AMO won't accept independent add-ons with the same addon ID but administered by different people.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough - I didn't mean to host the modified extensions page on mozillazine.org or on seamonkey-project.org but only to get their permission to use a web address under their subdomain. The actual hosting server would be located elsewhere.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Once Mozdev is back up that's a possibility... that is what was for basically. However the admin for mozillaZine is very busy with other projects and basically just makes sure the phpBB software and the server is up and running. I don't think he's be interested in expanding.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Lemon Juice »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Once Mozdev is back up that's a possibility... that is what was for basically.

I don't know if I'd want to keep the converter on Mozdev considering its shaky stability. If it's hosted elsewhere then at times like this that Mozdev is not available then at least the converter is still running instead of all the resources being down. Anyway, considering the low server requirements for the converter, this is not really needed, at least not in the closest foreseeable future.

patrickjdempsey wrote:However the admin for mozillaZine is very busy with other projects and basically just makes sure the phpBB software and the server is up and running. I don't think he's be interested in expanding.

Again, I don't want to host anything on mozillaZine nor expand the site. The only expansion I'm thinking of would be to ask the admin to point the DNS of a subdomain, say - addonconverter.mozillazine.org - to another server and that's it. I think it would be great if the converter's URL were under a domain that is more or less stable and associated with one of the 'big guy' SM-friendly sites. I could then open source the converter's code to github so that it's guaranteed not to be lost due to various things that might happen in the future.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by LoudNoise »

I'll email our admin and point him to this. I wouldn't hold my breath.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by kerz »

Read through the last page of this. I don't think it would be a good idea to have this on a Mozillazine domain. That said, it's super easy (and cheap) to setup a domain and host bits through something like an App Engine app. If I were to do this, I'd follow that route.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by LoudNoise »

Thanks for looking into this Kerz :)
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Gort »

Thought I'd report on a non-working Firefox extension.

Undo Closed Tabs Button 3.9.1 doesn't work after conversion. It installs, and the buttons and context menu items turn up as expected, but they don't do anything when used.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by patrickjdempsey »

SeaMonkey already has that built-in if you right-click on any tab.
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Re: Firefox & Thunderbird Add-on Converter for SeaMonkey

Post by Gort »

patrickjdempsey wrote:SeaMonkey already has that built-in if you right-click on any tab.


Yes, but it does more than that. It allows you to quickly view all the closed tabs that can be undone (as in Go>Recently Closed Tabs). It can even quickly alter the amount of closed tabs that can be undone, too. I'm not that fussed about it, for it'll only save me seconds, but I was interested enough to try it out.
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