[Project_owners] Can't get update to work

[Matthew Wilson]

Onno Ekker wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Matthew Wilson 
> <matthew at mjwilson.demon.co.uk <mailto:matthew at mjwilson.demon.co.uk>> wrote:
> 
>     Onno Ekker wrote:
>      > Hi,
>      >
>      > I thought I understood how Thunderbird checks for updates, but it
>      > doesn't work for my extension, so I must do something wrong. I've
>     looked
>      > over it a couple of times, removed all the signing stuff,
>     rereleased and
>      > reinstalled original version, waited for mirrors to sync, etc, but it
>      > still doesn't work.
>      >
>      > This is what I have done:
>      > - forward-0.1-tb.xpi contains an install.rdf with updateurl
>      > http://downloads.mozdev.org/forward/update.rdf
>      > - update.rdf contains information for version 0.2, with updatelink
>      > http://downloads.mozdev.org/forward/forward-0.2-tb.xpi
>      > - forward-0.2-tb.xpi is the new version
>      >
>      > Do I misunderstand the way Thunderbird looks for updates, or
>     doesn one
>      > of the files contain wrong information?
> 
>     If I try to load your RDF in Firefox, I get Page Info showing that the
>     content type is "application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml". This won't work I
>     think; text/xml or text/rdf would be OK; I wouldn't be surprised if
>     application/rdf+xml worked too now.
> 
>     Matthew
> 
> 
> I think the "application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml" content-type gets added by 
> Firefox because of the file extension or the way files as served. If I 
> rename it to update.txt, Firefox displays its content type as plain/text.

No, the server is deducing the content type based on the file extension. 
Firefox isn't changing it.

I tried to load the update.rdf a couple more times, and got different 
content types back each time. So I don't think you can rely on it 
working. Normally these update.rdfs are in the www directory of a mozdev 
project, not in downloads. I would recommend that you change yours to do 
this.

> Anyway, your comment sent me on the right track.
> I rewrite the update.rdf, and changed my local extensions.rdf to point 
> to file:///... and it works with the new content. Seems I or McCoy 
> changed the format to something that wasn't supported.
> And most of the docs are for Firefox and Thunderbird is lagging?
> 
> That leaves one question unanswered:
> Can someone please tell me how I can debug/monitor the update process? 
> That is, on Windows, with a normal Thunderbird build? At the moment it's 
> a blackbox. I can't see what URL's it is checking and what it does with 
> the returned information...

In Firefox, you can set the preference extensions.logging.enabled to 
true; or, if the worst comes to the worst, directly edit 
nsExtensionManager.js in the components directory. I assume these both 
work in Thunderbird.

Matthew